Small-Scale Pack & Fill

by

By Dan Shryock

Brian Zielinski acknowledges single-serve packaging is only a fraction of his company’s wholesale coffee roasting business. Still, some customers insist on private label capsules and his company needs to provide them.

“The K-cup business is a very small part of our work,” said Zielinski, the director of business development for Oregon-based West Coast Coffee. “But our customers don’t want to go somewhere else for their K-cups and we want our coffee packed in house.”

Like countless other small- to mid-size roasters, West Coast Coffee needed an entry-level machine. They turned to United Home Technologies about a year ago and purchased an iFill800XP, a tabletop solution that delivers up to 1,200 cups per hour.

“This is a good stepping stool for us,” Zielinski said. “It’s one more piece for our portfolio and you’ve got to start somewhere.”

United Home Technologies, with its “iFill Cup” systems, is among a growing list of fill-and-pack manufacturers supplying single-serve filling equipment to meet smaller production demands. Eastsign International Ltd. recently debuted new entry-level filling and sealing machines while GIMA, already producing large-scale filling equipment, acquired majority control of a nearby Italian company to meet the demand.

The coffee industry’s single-serve segment remains strong.

The National Coffee Association (NCA) estimates household penetration at 33% in the U.S. based on its January 2017 survey of past-day coffee drinkers. “This compares to 29% in 2016,” said Joe DeRupo, NCA director of external relations & communications. “We also see increased interest versus 2016 in buying a single-cup brewer in the next six months. This argues for continued growth of the systems,” he said.

In an addition to overall growth in the percentage of past-day coffee drinkers, long-term trends suggest the popularity of gourmet coffee beverages continues. Fifty-nine percent of those surveyed in 2010 preferred gourmet, according to the National Coffee Drinking Trends (NCDT) survey in January of that year. In the latest survey past-day coffee drinkers account for 67% of total cups. Past-day consumption of espresso-based beverages grew to 60% this year, up from 50% in 2010, according to the NCDT.

Tim Widmer, United Home Technologies’ vice president of sales, said enterprising roasters are creating new demands for small fill machinery.

“We have a roaster in Vancouver, B.C., who bought a filling system,” Widmer said. “He has a coffee kiosk in a grocery store. He’s put our filling system there and fills cups fresh every morning. He sells more cups in his kiosk than all the K-cups on the grocery shelves combined. He’s selling the quality of freshness.”

Andy Wang, president of Hong Kong-based Eastsign International Ltd., sees similar needs in the Asian marketplace and the opportunity for his company to meet the demand.

“The increasing popularity of single-capsule coffee and tea products presents vast opportunities to small and mid-size beverage product companies to market their specialized, gourmet drinking products,” Wang said. “But they are also facing challenges. In the past, small- to mid-size companies usually didn’t have the packaging production capability of their own. They needed large co-pack facilities to produce the final products, which often require a high minimal order quantity at a higher cost.”

Customers also are looking for equipment that allows them more flexibility to fill cups with products other than coffee, the manufacturers agreed.

“We are seeing clients looking towards innovations that allow them to run different capsule platforms on the same system,” said Dennis Winberry of IMA North America. “It’s not only coffees, teas, or solubles, but also espresso. This is an ever-expanding market in Europe, and increasingly so in North America, too. Our unique ability to offer such a hybrid solution, and in a variety of capsule styles, is a real time, space, and money saver.”

And Widmer, whose company is headquartered in Vancouver, Wash., is starting to get requests never imagined when they began work on their machines five years ago.

“We can fill any powder into a cup ―now cannabis coffee is becoming real popular,” he said, noting that recreational cannabis is legal in Washington, Oregon, California and other U.S. states. “We are getting more and more calls. I even had one person putting a Viagra-type medicine into a cup. There are all different kinds of applications that can be put into a single cup.”

GIMA buys Mapster

To address a broad range of customer fill-and-pack expectations, IMA, through its subsidiary GIMA, recently acquired majority interest in Mapster (See Coffee Report). Mapster, located in Parma, Italy, near GIMA’s Bologna offices, designs, manufactures, and markets single-serve capsules.

With the acquisition came a variety of equipment capable of handling capacities from 60 capsules to 360 capsules per minute. Included in that group is the Camaleonte filling and sealing machine with its three production lanes that can be operated one lane at a time and each with a different capsule style. And like its name – camaleonte means chameleon in Italian – manual changeovers take no more than 15 minutes, Winberry said.

“This helps address the growing trend wherein smaller companies are seeking to bring packaging into their own facilities,” he said.

The addition of Mapster adds to the IMA/GIMA collection of systems serving a variety of industries such as dairy, confection, teas and herbs, pharmaceutical, coffee, and more. The company regularly applies technology developed in one segment to another to improve a process.

“For example, with our liquid pharmaceutical experience, the GIMA division has been able to offer innovation in liquid flavor dosing of coffees, teas, and solubles, thereby saving the client the added complexities and expenses of adding dry flavoring,” Winberry said. “We are able to do so with flavor drops right into the capsule on the fly before the lid is applied.”

Eastsign’s entry-level packaging machine

Eastsign International’s new entry-level packaging machines are smaller and more versatile to appeal to small- and mid-size companies, Wang said.

“To meet the market needs, we have modified our mass production machines to balance the cost and the production capability,” Wang said. “Specifically, to reduce the cost we have designed a single-lane packaging machine with a lower speed of 25 to 30 cups per minute.”

The machine is also smaller, a compact 80 inches long, 26.5 inches wide and 70 inches tall. “At the same time, we have designed our machine with multiple functions such as adding nitrogen flushing and interchangeable modules for producing both compatible K-cups and Nespresso cups,” he said.

Fresh advantage

Widmer said the United Home Technologies product line fills the needs of roasters wanting to market quality with convenience. The company starts with the iFill800 that produces 800 cups and scales up to the iFill9000XP at 50,000 cups an hour. Four other models fit in between.

The company’s iFill cups are deep channel in design and therefore hold more grams. While a standard K-cup holds about 10 grams of product, the IFill cup takes 15.

“We’ve also taken the filter all the way to the very bottom (of the cup),” he said. “Our machines are volumetric. We can fill any powder into a cup. We could very easily do a soup.”