Hot-filling in India

Over the last two years in India, Coca-Cola has for the first time been marketing the established ‘maaza’ fruit-juice-based beverage brand in PET containers.

For this sensitive product, hot-filling is essential.

The Brindavan Group, an independent co-packer and licensee of Coca-Cola, has installed the Indian market’s first PET hot-fill line.

Headquartered in Bangalore, the Brindavan Group is Coca-Cola’s largest independent bottler/licensee in India.

The group operates six facilities in India, five of them in the northern province of Uttar Pradesh, and thus contributes approximately a tenth of Coca-Cola’s total production output in India.

Brindavan is a diverse conglomerate that also produces snacks and ice-cream, manufactures the inorganic animal feed additive di-calcium phosphate and has launched Air Deccan.

Proprietor S. N. Ladhani built up the company from nothing, to its present-day turnover of four billion Indian rupees, equivalent to about AU$118 million.

The group has been making soft drinks since 1983, initially as a licensee of Parlé.

Parlé had been set up under India’s socialist administration in 1977, to develop a counterpart to the international cola beverages as Coca-Cola had withdrawn from India.

Coca-Cola returned to India in 1993 and took over Parlé’s brands and production facilities, and Brindavan became the first bottler for Coca-Cola India.

The first bottle of Coke came off the line at Brindavan’s factory in Agra.

In 1998, Brindavan took over the Coca-Cola licensee facility in Bareilly, with a volume of 700,000 cartons, a figure that increased to 4.5 million by 2004.

Average annual growth over the past five years was 40%, compared with the national average of 7%.

Coca-Cola India had experienced capacity problems due to this growth so developed the concept of ‘Co-Pack Manufacturing Plants’ (co-packers), who bottle the products, but do not market them.

At that time, Coca-Cola India had launched what was called a five rupee bottle (equivalent to about 15 Australian cents a bottle), while at the same time reducing the volume for the widely used 300ml bottle to 200ml.

The goal was to make Coke accessible to less affluent sections of the population, and to increase brand awareness throughout India.

Demand was enormous, and triggered vigorous growth.

Brindavan installed a new Krones returnable-glass line at Hampi, 400 km to the north-east of Bangalore, and another at Faizabad in Uttar Pradesh.

Coca-Cola India also took over the traditional maaza beverage brand, marketed in mango flavour.

The mango is India’s most popular fruit, with more than 100 varieties.

Mango juice in India is much more widely drunk than apple and orange juice, which totally dominate the fruit juice market in Europe.

However, it is not possible, to produce a 100% mango juice: it would have a porridge-like consistency.

Up to then, the fruit-juice-based beverage, with a fruit content of 15%, had been sold solely in glass bottles.

Of the soft drinks market in India, 70% is covered by returnable glass bottles, while about 25% comes in PET, and approximately 5% of still beverages are carton packaged.

The aluminium can is a negligible quantity, at just under 1%, simply by reason of cost; while Indians can buy a normal lunch for 15 rupees, they have to pay 30 rupees for a can of soft drink.

Since PET packaging has been riding a continuous wave of popularity, Coca-Cola India decided to market maaza in PET bottles as well.

In 2005, Brindavan commissioned the first hot-fill juice bottling line for Coca-Cola India in the north Indian market.

“I wanted the best technology available on the market,” said Ladhani.

“We’d already had very good performance from our Krones lines for bottling carbonated beverages, and Krones was the only manufacturer offering the blow-moulding machine, the hot-filler and the installation work as a complete package.

“It’s important to know that we’re one of very few producers in India able to bottle the fruit juice beverages at very high temperatures of 88°C and more, for genuine hot-filling.”

The hot-fill line, rated at 9600 bph, was installed by Brindavan around 300km to the east of Delhi in the city of Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh.

This hot-fill line supplies the entire north Indian market with maaza.

Coca-Cola India has maaza bottled on another hot-fill line in the south of India, also by a co-packer.

These are Coca-Cola’s only two hot-fill lines in the sub-continent.

The launch of maaza in PET bottles during March 2005 created quite a lot of additional volume for this fruit-juice beverage brand.

In Uttar Pradesh, Brindavan markets the beverage, while outside this state sales are handled by Coca-Cola India.

maaza is being offered in the 1.2 litre PET bottle for around 42 rupees.

In this package size, the fruit juice beverage is geared to home consumption, where it is very popular.

The 600ml PET bottle by contrast, is intended more as a portion package, and is offered at about half the price.

India itself is a country with an enormous diversity of fruits.

However, industrial processing of the fruit, is not widely spread at present, which is why the Indian government is seeking to encourage fruit juice production, and has reduced to zero the national tax for fruit-juice-based beverages with a fruit content of at least 10%, whereas for soft drinks it is still at 15%.

The additional taxes levied by the individual states, by contrast, have remained equally high for both fruit-juice-based beverages and carbonated soft drinks.

“With increasing levels of health-awareness among the population, the potential for juices is risingl”, said Ladhani.

Coca-Cola India is planning to expand the maaza range to include different flavours.

Technical information

The hotfill BLOC is composed of a mechanical twin-channel Variojet rinser plus a Sensometic VPL-PET, which as a counter-pressure long-tube filler is ideally suited for bottling still beverages like maaza, even if they have a pulp content.

The VP family of fillers enables conductive, still beverages and higher-viscosity products to be effectively handled.

The long-tube version VPL provides options for gentle, below-surface cold- and hot-filling of products containing pulp and fruit cells.

The electro-pneumatic control system allows for pre-programmed filling steps, reproducible at will, precisely matched to the beverage being bottled and retrievable from the central control panel.

In the case of the VPL-PET, the lifting unit raises the bottle to the long-tube filling valve, the valve stem is then opened under electro-pneumatic control, and the product flows through the long tube into the bottle from below the surface.

The return gas escapes into the atmosphere.

A probe fitted to the outside of the filling tube signals when the specified fill level has been reached and triggers closing of the valve stem.

The filling tube is then drained completely into the bottle.

The hot-fill PET containers are produced in line on a Contiform H8 Hot-fill PET stretch blow-moulding machine.

Two of the line operators were trained at the Krones Academy, and then gained hands-on experience at a hot-fill line in China.

The remaining operators received on-the-job training.

The Contiform H8 produces the 600ml and 1.2 litre hot-fill containers, which Krones also helped to design.

They are passed to the hot-fill rinser/filler BLOC via an air conveyor, built locally to conform to the Krones layout.