Bagged milk, carton-packed yogurt, various-shaped bottled beverages... Nowadays, when you walk into a supermarket, the shelves are filled with a wide variety of drinks. Canning, as an indispensable part of the packaging production process for liquid foods, has long faced technical bottlenecks. Especially, the high-speed, high-precision, and aseptic canning technology has long been monopolized by foreign countries. However, this situation is now witnessing a historic breakthrough.
The China Rural Technology Development Center recently held a site exhibition of the "Food Manufacturing and Agricultural Product Logistics Technology Support" key project of the "14th Five-Year Plan" National Key Research and Development Program in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. At the event, it was announced that the flexible, high-speed, high-precision, and aseptic filling equipment independently developed by China, with a production rate of 48,000 bottles per hour, has simultaneously entered the global top ranks. This marks that China has successfully broken the foreign technological monopoly in the field of food equipment and has officially achieved a historic leap from "following" to "parallel" development.
Aseptic filling is a crucial step in the production of liquid foods, directly affecting people's livelihood security and health. However, the promotion of aseptic filling in the liquid food industry once encountered numerous difficulties. Project leader Professor Liu Donghong from Zhejiang University explained that in the early days, beverage enterprises mostly adopted secondary sterilization technology or wet aseptic filling technology. That is, after the raw materials were sterilized, they were filled again and then sterilized again through the packaging material, or the raw materials were sterilized first, and then the packaging material used wet aseptic filling technology before packaging. "Both technologies have high energy consumption and high costs," Liu Donghong said.
As consumers' demands for food safety and personalization continue to rise, it has become increasingly urgent to develop filling equipment that meets domestic market needs and possesses independent intellectual property rights.
The equipment for aseptic filling of plastic bottles was first introduced internationally. However, due to technical barriers, patent protection, and other reasons, this technology was long monopolized by international giant enterprises. Companies could only invest heavily to acquire it. "An imported aseptic filling production line usually costs between 800 million and 1 billion yuan, which is equivalent to a company's profits for several years," said Liu Donghong, expressing his feelings.
Technical bottlenecks also hinder product innovation. Liu Donghong explained: "Acidic beverages inherently have a certain antibacterial effect, but neutral foods such as coffee and milk tea cannot rely on the product's characteristics to achieve antibacterial effects. If the sterilization is not thorough, the remaining bacterial spores may even germinate."
In the exhibition area of the venue, new products such as coffee and milk tea attracted visitors to come and taste. Liu Donghong introduced that the bottling of neutral beverages like coffee is the most challenging. It is necessary to ensure that the materials, bottle bodies, caps, filling and sealing and other processes are all sterile. These products require the use of sterile filling technology to ensure the flavor. "Unlike the traditional wet sterilization method, this equipment adopts an efficient and continuous dry sterilization technology, significantly reducing the amount of sterilization agents used and energy consumption."
Shi Zheng added that the new equipment has extended the sterile production time from 72 hours to 144 hours. "The traditional wet sterile filling technology requires a shutdown every 72 hours to flush the pipelines with sterile water, which leads to high production costs. However, the new equipment not only extends the period for maintaining the sterile environment but also eliminates the need for adding preservatives and enables more stable nutrient components. As a result, the production costs for enterprises have been significantly reduced."
At present, a number of large-scale beverage packaging production lines are operating simultaneously with both domestic and foreign equipment, competing with each other. In recent years, with the increasing demand for small-batch, multi-variety, and personalized products, higher requirements have been placed on the compatibility, speed, and accuracy of filling equipment. As foreign equipment becomes increasingly difficult to meet the personalized needs, the "flexibility" advantage of domestically produced sterile filling equipment has gradually emerged. "Through an intelligent control system, enterprises can flexibly adjust the equipment according to their needs," Liu Donghong said. The project team's independently intellectual property flexible sterile filling valve can be compatible with different types of liquid food filling and can achieve a one-click switch of the filling mode for the entire production line. Currently, this series of equipment has been widely applied in industry leaders such as Yili, Nongfu Spring, Jinmaolang, and Yunge Forest, promoting the domestic substitution process of high-end food equipment.
The project team stated that in the future, they will further accelerate the industrialization process and promotion of the equipment, seize the commanding heights of food equipment technology development, effectively meet the high-quality development needs of the industry, and help China join the ranks of the world's top food equipment manufacturing powers early.
Looking to the future, there are still key challenges for China's high-end intelligent food equipment manufacturing. For instance, how to achieve decisive breakthroughs in key areas such as high-end components, specialized materials, and core technologies that have long relied on foreign countries. How to promote technological transformation and upgrading, and advance China's food manufacturing equipment towards intelligence and greenness. These issues still require the joint efforts of the industry.
