Equipment: The perfect fill
The cosmetics and personal care industry is all about image and reputation. Projecting the right image can be achieved through celebrity-fronted ad campaigns, but safeguarding a brand's reputation requires products to be unvarying in quality, cleanly filled and perfectly packaged.
The filling operation plays a distinctly unglamorous but very necessary role in ensuring the reality lives up to the glossy ad campaign. If product dribbles down the side of the container, or a bottle is too full or not full enough, or worse still, contaminated with another product, it will impact on the consumer's perception of that brand.
According to French filling equipment manufacturer Serac, the most reliable and accurate means of filling cosmetic and personal care products cleanly and efficiently is net weigh filling.
"The system is based on the weighing or ‘taring' of the container," explains Aymeric Vague, marketing manager of Serac's industrial, perfume, beauty and health divisions. "It is the only system that controls the quantity of product at the time of filling and not upstream. This gives the certainty that every container is filled with the stated quantity, a particular advantage for aerated liquids." In addition, he says, net weigh filling prevents costly over-filling of expensive products.
Serac's net weigh filler is a rotary machine called the Métis, which is designed for the high-speed filling of shampoos, shower gels and other personal care products. Serac says the machine's ability to cleanly fill containers at speeds of up to 600 bottles per minute (bpm) with viscous products is down to the fact the container platform rises up and allows the pipe to penetrate the container neck.
Ocme UK is another firm advocate of net weigh fillers for shampoos, conditioners and lotions on the basis that it is a clean and accurate filling method. "Because you're weighing the product, it's very accurate," says sales manager Peter Mayhew. "It's also very clean, because you have no contact with the bottle mouth."
Net profits
Ocme has just supplied a complete line to PZ Cussons that incorporates net weigh filling. Installed at the company's brand new facility in Agecroft, Manchester, the high-speed line fills shampoos and conditioners, of various viscosities, into a range of bottle sizes up to a maximum of 500ml.
Ocme has also just developed a new net weigh filler incorporating a two-part tank, which is capable of filling two products into one container - either simultaneously or one after the other. This allows companies to create ‘shake and mix' products with two components or package two products in one container that is split down the
