On the day when the Chilean order was received, the workshop master Lao Chen deliberately poured a handful of Yunnan small-grain coffee beans into the coffee packaging machine under debugging. He said: "Let the equipment remember the taste of Chinese coffee first, so that it will not be easy to acclimate after crossing the ocean." Three months later, when our technical team stood in the factory in Santiago and watched the same model of coffee packaging machine swallowing and spitting out the local unique volcanic coffee beans, they really understood Lao Chen's deep meaning.
The Chilean customer purchased our factory's latest upgraded vertical coffee packaging machine, which specializes in coarsely ground coffee powder. The equipment encountered a difficult problem just after unpacking - the humid sea breeze in South America caused a layer of water droplets to condense on the surface of the precision parts. The accompanying electrician Xiao Zhao immediately started the emergency plan, first using a dehumidifier to work continuously for eight hours, and then applying our self-developed moisture-proof coating to the key circuit boards. Diego, the customer's production supervisor, looked at the operating screen that was lit up again, holding up a cup of yerba mate and saying "incredible" three times in a row.
The debugging stage is the most challenging. Due to the characteristics of volcanic rock soil, the fluidity of local coffee powder is about 15% lower than that of conventional products, resulting in frequent jamming of the metering bucket. Our engineer Lao Wang took out the debugging manual stored in his mobile phone and took the local workers to adjust the inclination of the spiral feeder overnight. At three o'clock in the morning, when the first bag of 250g coffee powder was perfectly sealed, the technical director of the Chilean side suddenly said "precision" in Chinese, which made us all laugh.
This cross-border technical support made me deeply appreciate the ability of "shooting the bull from behind the mountain". A talented worker found that the heat seal temperature fluctuated abnormally. During the video call, Zhang from the domestic R&D department stared at the real-time data and suddenly asked: "Are you producing two specifications of packaging bags at the same time?" It turned out that the customer's temporary increase in production demand caused the equipment load to change. We immediately turned on the dual-channel temperature control mode. This emergency plan was later written into the factory's overseas service standard process.
During the 20 days in Chile, our coffee packaging machine not only conquered the altitude changes of the Andes Mountains, but also unexpectedly harvested a "by-product". The stray cats near the customer's factory always like to curl up at the bottom of the equipment to keep warm. The workers joked that this is the "Chilean quality inspector". Unexpectedly, this detail inspired us. After returning to China, we added a temperature monitoring module to the base of the equipment, which can now warn of the risk of motor overheating in advance.
On the eve of our departure, the customer's boss Louis took us to visit his private coffee estate. Looking at the coffee trees all over the mountains, he stroked our coffee packaging machine and said: "This Chinese machine is now soaking coffee beans grown in Chilean soil. It's a wonderful fate." In the third week after returning to China, we received a video shot by mobile phone - the packaged coffee bags were being shipped to Brazil, and our equipment indicator lights were flashing regularly in the background, just like the lighthouse on the Chilean coastline.
This trip to South America allowed our factory to improve three key technical parameters. What's more surprising is that the Chilean customer took the initiative to help us connect with three potential customers. Now there is a note on the prototype in the workshop, with "Gracias" written in Spanish on it, and a steaming coffee cup is drawn next to it. Every time a new customer comes to visit, we will tell this Chilean story - after all, good equipment will speak for itself, and what we have to do is to make it "open" smoothly in every corner of the world.
