Aseptic in Winchester: shelf stable products in plastic bottles are the newest addition to HP Hood's premier facility

Dairy Foods, Dec, 2004 by David Phillips

WINCHESTER, Va. -- It has been just four years since bottles of NesQuik and CoffeMate products began rolling off the line at Hood's massive Winchester, Va., plant, and this month, a new filling line with aseptic capability joins the mix as part of the largest expansion to date.

Winchester, the home of the late country music legend Patsy Cline, was chosen for its location and its workforce, as the site of what has become a cornerstone of Hood's metamorphosis from a venerable, but rusty regional leader, to one of the top national dairy companies. With the addition of an aseptic line, capable of producing flavored milk and other low-acid fluid products in single serve plastic bottles, this 400,000 sq ft plant continues to play a crucial rote in Hood's future.

"Hood would not be the company it has become in the ESL world, were it not for Winchester," says John Kaneb, Hood's Chairman.

"The new installation at Winchester provides us with the opportunity to produce aseptic products in plastic bottles. It will certainly be employed for NesQuik, for Carb Countdown and probably for other products that have yet to surface."

During the past four years the Winchester plant has continued to grow as the plant's original design plans were fully implemented. With the first major addition completed, the plant now has five process systems feeding six individual fillers. It runs 7 days a week, and it processes in excess of 70 million gals per year.

Hood has invested "the better part of $200 million" in the plant which now employs around 350 people. The current expansion cost more than $40 million.

The new line features an 81-head aseptic rotary filler built in Japan by Shibuya Kogyo. It has the capability of filling up to 600 pint bottles per minute.

When Dairy Foods visited the Winchester site in mid-October more than a dozen technicians from Shibuya were onsite putting the finishing touches on the installation. Half of the plant's auditorium-like training room had been given over temporarily as a control center for the installation project.

"A good number of Hood people traveled to Japan earlier this year during the purchase and assembly," says Leigh Pehrson, Hood's director of ESL Operations. "Subsystems were assembled and tested in Japan before being disassembled and shipped here."

Pehrson, a long-time member of the Hood operations team, has been in Winchester for about two years. He says the process of expanding the plant and adding aseptic capabilities has been remarkable. The Shibuya filler itself is an amazing sight--a double deck of steel and glass. The exterior steel is as shiny as the chrome on a Harley Davidson, and the windows reveal lighted chambers with bright rotors and filling heads looking more like a jewelry store display case than a packaging machine.

The Shibuya system is similar to an installation at a Mott's juice plant in Aspers, Pa. but this is the first dairy application in the U.S. Shibuya has a U.S. office in Modesto, Calif.

Fast and simple

The filler is capable of running at blinding speeds.

"It's a high-speed rotary filler that can fill 600 bottles per minute using 16 oz bottles," says Lee Baker, dir. of engineering at Hood. "It uses a different sterilant than most rotary fillers, which is why we will be able to use it for aseptic."

Shibuya has been using aseptic-approved sterilant for some time in fillers it has designed for pharmaceutical and beverage markets worldwide. But this will be the first time such a system has been used for low acid products in the United States.

Baker gave Dairy Foods a brief description of how the filling system works:

Product is batched and then UHT (Ultra High Temperature) treated with a slightly modified version of a Tetra Pak VTIS direct injection steam system.

The blowmolded bottles are infed with a screw feeder and are then picked up by a series of rotors with neck grippers that transport the bottles through the sterilization filling and capping processes. The bottles are sprayed inside and out with heated sterilant then heated and sprayed with a sterile water rinse. The heat treatment activates the sterilent and dries the bottle.

The rotary filler uses net weight filling. Shibuya says the fill is accurate to less than half a gram.

An internal servo-driven capper fits each bottle with a cap that has also been sterilized in the same method as the bottles. The entire capping procedure takes place within the sterile chamber. An aseptic seal is formed simply by the physical design of the cap and the bottle neck.

The hygienic filling chambers are sealed and are only accessible to operators through glove boxes, another indication of Shibuya's experience in pharmaceutical. Because they are conveyed with neck grippers, the bottles are less subject to jamming, but the glove boxes do allow the operator to make corrections when needed. The mechanics of the machine are accessible from outside the machine.

Sensors within the machine detect problem bottles and reject them before they are filled. Those chambers are run with a positive air pressure using sterilized air. For washdown, the piping and milk lines are CIP treated and the interior surfaces of the chambers are also treated with an automated washdown and sterilization system.