In late autumn last year, Director Zhou of a century-old hot sauce factory in the southwest rushed into our workshop with dark circles under his eyes, holding a bulging and deformed bag of hot oil in his hand: "This is the third batch of leaking products online! The return rate of e-commerce is about to overwhelm us." Behind him, the cartons were piled with "killed" packaging machines-ordinary equipment could not withstand the high viscosity of chili oil, and the heat seal was always as fragile as a tissue soaked in oil.
We have seen this scene a lot. The original intention of developing the sauce filling and sealing machine was to solve this kind of "oil seal war". Mr. Liu from the technical department picked up the simulated chili oil in the prototype hopper. It was a "devil's formula" specially prepared by the R&D team - 30% more viscous than ordinary chili oil. When the equipment is started, the special screw pushes the material at a uniform speed like kneading dough, and the anti-wall design of the filling nozzle allows the last drop of chili oil to fall accurately into the bag. Director Zhou touched the sealed sample bag and murmured: "This sealing line is as smooth as a ruler." In fact, the most difficult bone to chew is the aseptic filling environment. A high-end mushroom sauce company in Sichuan and Chongqing once required the equipment to meet medical-grade clean standards in the filling area. Our engineers transformed the core area of the sauce filling and sealing machine into a "triple protection cabin": the positive pressure wind curtain isolates external dust, the ultraviolet sterilization module is automatically activated every half an hour, and even the operator has to pass through the air shower room to contact the equipment. On the day of acceptance, the customer's quality inspection manager held the colony culture dish and exclaimed: "This data is more beautiful than our laboratory." The flexibility of switching between multiple specifications is a rigid demand of customers. A compound seasoning company in Guangdong has 28 packaging specifications. It used to take two hours to stop the machine to change the model. Now their sauce filling and sealing machine is equipped with a magnetic mold, and the switching is as convenient as changing the protective case for a mobile phone. During the video visit last week, the workshop director proudly showed the new 20-gram travel package: "Making garlic sauce in the morning and cutting crayfish seasoning packets in the afternoon. The equipment adapts faster than the workers." However, the most thrilling test came from a popular chopped pepper factory in Hunan. On the eve of Double Eleven last year, their sauce filling and sealing machine suddenly "struck". When our after-sales service team drove 600 kilometers to arrive, they found that the pepper seeds blocked the filling valve. When technician Lao Chen drilled into the bottom of the equipment for maintenance, his work clothes were stained red by the chopped pepper juice, but he still joked with the customer: "This time I really became a 'hot technician'." When the equipment was restarted at three o'clock in the morning, the applause in the workshop was even more enthusiastic than the chopped pepper. Now when you walk into our debugging workshop, you can always see the sauce filling and sealing machine "showing off" - here it is filling sesame paste at a 45-degree angle, and there it is already doing cold sealing tests on hot pot base packaging. Some customers say that our equipment is like "Transformers", but in fact there is no black technology, but the experience of twenty years of hard work in the industry has been brewed into every part.
Last month, Director Zhou sent new data: the yield rate of the transformed production line is stable at the upstream level of the industry, and the word "oil leakage" has never appeared in the negative reviews of e-commerce. What is even more gratifying is that their hot sauce gift boxes have entered high-end supermarkets, and the "Made in China" logo on the packaging is particularly eye-catching. This reminds me of what Lao Liu always said when debugging the equipment: "Good equipment should not steal the limelight, but should be like the purple clay teapot of an old tea drinker - the more you use it, the smoother it becomes, and the more you use it, the more you understand the owner's mind." From sticky sesame paste to pungent mustard paste, from 5 grams of seasoning dips to 1 kilogram of family packs, the sauce filling and sealing machine carries the ever-changing taste of China. Every time we receive new product samples from customers, we not only taste the flavor innovation, but also the progress of packaging technology. In the future, we will continue to deepen our research on aseptic technology and intelligent operation and maintenance. After all, in this era of "appearance economy", good taste needs good packaging to represent it.
