Sipa

Sipa and major Asian food and beverage producer URC have together developed what are believed to be among the lightest hot-fill bottles in the world. The bottles are used for a market-leading brand of green tea-based drink. Hot-fill technology is popular for numerous reasons: in particular, it means fewer preservatives have to be used in the food or beverage while avoiding the costs of aseptic filling.
There are two designs for the new hot-fill bottles: the smaller, 230-mL bottle weighs just 12.5 g – that’s 2.5g less than URC’s previous design; the larger, 1.5-L hot fill bottle, at 48.5g, weighs close to 4 g less than its predecessor. In both cases, dedicated preforms were designed in order to reach optimum mechanical performance. And both incorporate the “HotLight 28” short neck finish completely designed by Sipa.
The "HotLight 28" is shorter than standard hotfill neck finishes and is the main reason why the bottle is so light. HotLight 28 weighs just 3.8 g and represents a real revolution in hot-fill thread finishes. This 28-mm neck is the evolution of a traditional neck that is usually adopted for CSD. Despite its ultralow weight, it in no way compromises the bottle seal. It also allows the production of hot fill and CSD containers on the same machine without any personalization change.
“Sipa has always been our partner for new designs and upgrading existing designs,” says David J. Lim, URC Vice-President Operation, Logistics & R&D. “Other existing bottle shapes are now on the line for light weighting.”
URC, headquartered in Pasig City in the Philippines, is a leader in the food sector in various countries. It has seen the beverage market grow in leaps and bounds ever since it produced the first locally manufactured coffee blend, Blend 45, in the 1960s. Recent years have seen the rapid rise of the ready-to-drink tea category, through the launch of URC’s flagship product, C2 Cool & Clean, the first locally-manufactured green tea-based beverage, sold in PET bottles. In a short period, C2 grabbed important shares of the market for hot filled products in the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia.
Sipa and URC collaborated from the start of the C2 project, which dates back to 2004, working together to choose the most suitable technology, the most appropriate process and most competitive packaging in order to obtain high performance and highly flexible lines. In particular, the packaging has been studied to give an economic advantage thanks to a container weight reduction program.
“Sipa has a very professional and experienced technical team,” says Lim. “New installations and format changes are successfully and quickly completed. With the technical support of the Sipa team, we were able to permanently reduce the weight of our bottles and yet we can still keep the needed bottle strength.” URC now has a total of 16 Sipa bottle production and filling lines installed in the Philippines and Vietnam. The lines are mainly composed of ECS FX 20/80 integrated bottle production systems feeding various types of filling systems. The six most recently installed lines feature Stillfill R/hr machines for hot fill applications (four in all), one Isotronic filling machine for CSDs and hot fill, and one Unitronic Ultra Clean for hot fill.
The ECS integrated system helps save weight in another way too. Its use of induction heating in the preform conditioning station – a Sipa exclusive – provides unparallel temperature control at all points of the preform and thus enables the wall thickness profile to be fully optimized.
“The Sipa ECS gives us a lot of energy and PET resin savings,” says Lim. “Since the experience with our existing machines is very good, we decided to continue the partnership with Sipa.” URC - Universal Robina Corporation – traces its roots back to 1954 when John Gokongwei founded what was then called Universal Corn Products (UCP) to make glucose and cornstarch. He started making own-brand products in the 1960s – first coffee, then chocolates, then poultry products, then snacks - and has never looked back since. URC now participates in numerous strategic segments in the beverage market, with ready-to-drink teas and coffee, juices, bottled waters, energy drinks and other products. The corporation as a whole now has annual sales of close to two billion dollars, with production operations in China and numerous South-East Asian countries, including Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam. It has groups dedicated to branded consumer foods, to commodity foods (flour and sugar) and to agro-industrial products. It also has a Packaging Division, making biaxially oriented polypropylene (BOPP) films.