At the foot of Wuyi Mountain, Lao Lin, the owner of a jasmine tea workshop, is worried about the piles of packaging boxes. The 3,000 national style gifts that were sold out in the live broadcast room required each box to contain 2g jasmine tea bags, 5 dried flowers and customized bookmarks, but the aunts in the handmade workshop struggled for a long time and the packaging error rate was as high as 15%. "We need both individuality and efficiency. Can small factories only choose one of the two?" Lao Lin pinched the returned tea box, and the wrinkled edge of the packaging seemed to be engraved with the collective anxiety of small and medium-sized tea enterprises.
This dilemma is not uncommon in the tea industry. With the segmentation of the consumer market, the customized needs of small and medium-sized tea companies have exploded. From the special-shaped packaging of cultural and creative tea gifts to the multi-material combination of blended tea, traditional standardized tea packaging machines have been unable to cope with it. The investment of millions of yuan in high-end customized equipment has made small factories with an annual output value of less than 10 million yuan daunting.
In the R&D workshop of ply-pack, engineers are debugging a "Transformer"-like tea packaging machine. The main body of the equipment consists of 7 independent modules, which can be freely disassembled and reassembled like Lego blocks. In response to the pain points of customers like Lao Lin, the technical team has developed a fast changeover system: when changing the packaging form, only the corresponding metering module (accuracy of ±0.1g) and the sealing mold need to be replaced, and the whole process time is shortened from 6 hours of traditional equipment to 20 minutes. Application data of a white tea factory in Quanzhou shows that the equipment is compatible with 12 packaging forms from 0.5g tea bags to 500g tea cakes, and the changeover loss rate is controlled within 0.3%.
"Hardware modularization is just the first step. The real killer is hidden in the system." Project leader Zhang Gong clicked on the "smart scheduling" interface on the control screen. When customers need to handle small e-commerce orders and large wholesale orders at the same time, the system will automatically analyze the order data, intelligently cluster the same type of packaging tasks, and reduce the preheating wait when sealing the aluminum foil through dynamic temperature control technology. After a Longjing company in Zhejiang Province enabled this function, the production efficiency of mixed orders increased by 40% and energy consumption decreased by 18%. What makes small and medium-sized tea companies even more excited is the "on-demand rental" model - idle modules can be returned in the off-season, and specific functions can be rented in the peak season, and the equipment utilization rate has increased from the industry average of 65% to 89%.
In the Tieguanyin production area of Anxi, the trial case of tea merchant Ms. Huang is quite representative. Through modular tea packaging machines, she has achieved agile production of "new products per week": 200 constellation tea bags exclusive to live broadcasts were produced on Monday, and 4g experience packages customized for scenic spots were switched to on Wednesday, and logo hot stamping gift boxes were rushed for corporate customers on Friday. This flexible production capacity has increased her customer unit price by 30%, while the proportion of packaging costs has dropped from 12% to 8%.
In the Wuyishan workshop in the twilight, Lao Lin is staring at the first batch of gift boxes spit out by the new equipment. The robotic arm accurately inserts the bookmark into the right side of the tea bag, and the hot stamping module draws a smooth arc under the moonlight. The sound of packing tape being torn came from next door, but he knew that this transformation that started with the packaging machine is rewriting the fate of small and medium-sized tea companies - from "not daring to accept orders" to "accurately generating income", perhaps all that is missing is a machine that knows how to bend down and embrace the market.
