The morning mist in the old city of Zigong has not yet dissipated, and Chen Jianguo, the third-generation heir of Chen Changji, is already standing at the door of the filling workshop. On the mottled brick wall hangs an old photo from 1952, in which the masters are scooping chili sauce into jars with wooden spoons. At this moment, three brand-new sauce packaging machine production lines are humming softly, injecting amber spicy sauce into glass bottles, and the air is filled with the familiar pepper fragrance and the unique cold breath of metal.
This spicy sauce company, founded in 1912, was in trouble due to the quality fluctuations of manual filling. "The masters scooped ten spoonfuls of hot sauce, and the difference was half a pound." Chen Jianguo recalled, stroking the copper measuring tools left by his ancestors. Although the traditional craftsmanship retains the flavor, the standard deviation of the accuracy of manual filling is as high as 8.7% when facing EU export certification, which has become a bottleneck restricting development.
The turning point came in the fall of 2022. Recommended by the Sichuan Sauce Food Association, Chen Changji introduced the fifth-generation sauce packaging machine developed by ply-pack. On the day the equipment entered the factory, the masters gathered in the workshop and whispered: "Can the iron lump distinguish the ratio of Erjingtiao and Chaotian pepper?"
The secret of this sauce packaging machine is hidden in the constant temperature system of the filling head. When the spicy sauce mixed with peanut crumbs enters the silo, the equipment automatically turns on the 35¡æ precise temperature control, and the viscous sauce slides through 128 micro flow sensors like silk. Sister Liu, who has worked in the quality inspection department for 20 years, found that for each bottle of sauce filled by the new equipment, the interface error between pepper and oil does not exceed 1 mm, which is a precision that can never be achieved by manual operation.
What surprised the team even more was the chain effect brought by intelligent production:
· The filling accuracy has been improved from ±5 grams to ±0.3 grams, which exceeds the EU standard by 40%
· The AI vision system built into the equipment can automatically remove the pepper seeds remaining at the bottle mouth
· The production data is uploaded to the cloud in real time to meet the export traceability requirements
In March 2023, when the expert group of the Sichuan Sauce Food Association entered the workshop, they encountered the start of the equipment self-inspection program. The mechanical arm of the sauce packaging machine flipped flexibly, and 64 nano nozzles performed three-dimensional flushing on the filling cavity. The residual detector showed a value of "0.01g", which attracted the experts to nod and praise. This hard power that speaks with data has made Chen Changji the first time-honored brand in the southwest region to pass the association's "Intelligent Production Demonstration Base" certification.
"Now, for every order exported to Germany, the filling data is directly synchronized to the EU customs." Chen Jianguo pointed to the containers being packed and said with a smile. Outside the workshop window, the setting sun gilded the metal shell of the sauce packaging machine, and the production data jumping on the control screen seemed to be writing a new chapter for this century-old brand.
