At six in the morning, the packaging workshop of a tea factory in Anxi, Fujian, was filled with the orchid fragrance of Tieguanyin. Factory Director Chen Jianping stood beside the assembly line, but his brows were slightly wrinkled-no matter how fast the manual packaging group moved, it could not catch up with the pre-sale orders that kept jumping on the e-commerce platform. "This batch of high mountain oolong will be sent to the northeast the day after tomorrow, and the packaging progress is only 40% complete..." He stroked the wrinkles on the tea sample bag and suddenly remembered the fully automatic tea packaging machine he saw at the exhibition last week.
This scene is being repeated in tea producing areas across the country. With the expansion of the new tea beverage track and the improvement of consumers' requirements for packaging quality, the traditional tea packaging model is facing a double test. As a technology supplier with 15 years of experience in the field of packaging machinery, we have received inquiries from tea companies around the country, and "tea packaging machine" has become a high-frequency word. In the past three months, the number of related inquiries has increased by 230% year-on-year.
"In fact, many customers initially just wanted to solve the problem of insufficient manpower." Engineer Li, who is responsible for after-sales service in East China, recalled that when installing the first automated packaging line for a Longjing company in Hangzhou last year, the workshop director repeatedly emphasized that "as long as it is faster than manual labor, it will be fine." But when they saw that the tea packaging machine could not only achieve a stable production capacity of 60 bags per minute, but also automatically identify loose tea of different weights, the company added an order for moisture-proof aluminum foil packaging modules on the spot.
Behind this cognitive change is the deep fission of tea consumption scenarios. Triangular tea bags on supermarket shelves, national style souvenirs in live broadcast rooms, business cans in airport duty-free shops...Multiple channels have given rise to personalized needs for tea packaging machines. The flexible packaging system recently developed by our technical team is developed for this type of customized needs. It is compatible with seven packaging forms from 0.5g tea powder to 500g tea cakes, and can even customize hot stamping patterns according to the customer's brand tone.
In the Pu'er tea producing area of the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, moisture-proof technology has become the most concerned upgrade direction for tea companies. This rainy season, the intelligent packaging workshop we renovated for a tea factory in Menghai withstood the test: the tea packaging machine with integrated humidity sensing device can automatically start the secondary deoxygenation program during packaging, and with nano-level barrier materials, the moisture content of the tea is always controlled below 5%. The person in charge of the tea factory sighed during the return visit: "In the past, there was always a loss of about 5% in the rainy season. Now even the tea stems in the warehouse remain crispy."
Faced with the wave of industry upgrades, some small and medium-sized tea companies still have transformation concerns. At the tea machine technology exchange meeting held in Xiamen last month, we specially set up a "packaging workshop transformation sandbox": through a proportionally reduced dynamic model, we intuitively demonstrated how the tea packaging machine can be connected with the existing production line. After observing the entire sorting-metering-nitrogen filling-sealing process, the person in charge of a jasmine tea workshop in Quanzhou finally agreed to test-install the basic version of the equipment to "solve the quantitative packaging problem of jasmine buds first."
In the twilight of Anxi Tea Factory, Chen Jianping is checking the operating data of the newly installed tea packaging machine through a mobile phone APP. On the monitoring screen, the automatic calibration device is fine-tuning the sealing temperature of the aluminum foil bag, and the robotic arm stacks the packaged tea bags into neat "tea bricks". Outside the workshop, the transport vehicle turns on its taillights and drives to the logistics center with the cargo box completed 12 hours ahead of schedule. This technological change, which began with efficiency anxiety, is redefining the modernization standards of China's tea industry.
