A Bit on the Side
Design and Process Development
Comparison of bottles
Cooking area
Label
Major issues arose in formulating the products, requiring innovative solutions. They included product characterisation, and scaling up production from batches of a few litres in the laboratory, through about 500 litres in the pilot plant to the thousands of litres in the batches in the production plant.
COP Outcome development and evaluation
Maintaining the desired flavour balance of the initial concept recipes in the plant formulation for large-scale production involved much careful experimentation. The maintenance of acidity after processing was also critical to ensuring that the products kept well, and it proved difficult with some of the sauces. Other problems arose in areas such as the viscosities of sauces and the behaviour of starches and thickeners; and constituents such as oils in emulsions tended to separate on standing. It was crucial to secure ingredients with low mould counts so that the products’ shelf lives would be long enough, and this involved liaison with and checking of suppliers. The solutions were not obvious, and a good deal of laboratory and pilot-plant work was needed to find them.
Once these hurdles were overcome, intensive work began on preparing commercial products. Six sauces emerged from the initial development stage. These now had to be formulated and a full product specification developed for production. This work started early in August, and agreed products and plant procedures were finally reached on 12 September.
Packaging
Packaging presented special problems. In the available time, it was not possible to design and make new bottles. After exploring the possibilities fat-necked bottles, originally designed for soft drinks, were settled upon as the best available option. Provision had to be made for capping bottles with a hot fill. Labels needed designing. A deep anti-tamper sleeve had to be organised, so that when the same weight of sauces with slightly different specific gravities went into the uniformly-sized bottles, the resultant variation in level would be concealed behind the sleeve.
COP Outcome development and evaluation
After a product demonstration to the trade, it was decided to change the configuration of the tray on which the bottles were supplied from 4x3 to 5x2 bottles, to improve the appearance of the display. This required a last-minute redesign of the corrugated board trays and reorganisation of assembling lines.
Co-ordination
There were effectively three teams working on the project: the product manager’s team in Auckland, and the product technology and packaging technology teams in Hastings. Their work had to co-ordinated and combined. Co-operation among many people with diverse skills was excellent, and contributed to the speedy achievement of a successful outcome.
