The Soft Drink Market is Gradually Expanding

In the hot summer, many people choose to drink a drink to relieve the heat. In the past two years, new products in the domestic beverage market have been continuously launched. Milk tea, fruit juice, soda, and functional drinks have emerged one after another, and consumers have continuously increased their choices. At the same time, thanks to consumption upgrades, domestic beverage market sales have also continued to increase. And behind this, the development of soft drink filling equipment is also "indispensable."

At present, the domestic beverage industry has a wide variety of subdivisions, including packaged drinking water, protein drinks, fruit juice drinks, carbonated drinks, tea drinks, coffee drinks and so on. According to a report by a consulting agency, in 2019, the domestic soft drink market reached 991.4 billion yuan, with a compound annual growth rate of 5.9% from 2014 to 2019. It is estimated that by 2024, the domestic soft drink market will reach 1323.0 billion yuan.

In the beverage production process, filling is one of the important links. Therefore, filling equipment on the beverage production line is indispensable. There are three main methods commonly used for beverage filling: atmospheric filling method, pressure gravity filling method, and vacuum filling method.

According to different filling methods, the types of filling equipment can also be divided into atmospheric filling machines, pressure filling machines, vacuum filling machines, etc. my country's filling machinery manufacturing industry started in the 1960s. At first, the industry mostly adopted the "introduction-imitation" production model. Most filling equipment has problems such as high procurement costs, large and heavy equipment, difficult installation, and high maintenance costs.

However, thanks to the efforts of scientific researchers, my country's filling technology has entered the stage of independent innovation from the imitation stage, the technology continues to mature, and equipment costs have fallen. Nowadays, my country's filling equipment has developed from large-scale equipment to small and medium-sized equipment; from semi-automatic filling to fully automatic filling. At the same time, the equipment can also be combined with bottle unscrambler, bottle washing machine, capping machine, labeling machine and other equipment to form a complete set of filling solutions.

While certain achievements have been made in the development of domestic filling equipment, some new development directions have also emerged. For example, high-speed filling. Nowadays, the scale of the beverage market continues to expand, and the demand for production capacity of manufacturers is also increasing. This requires equipment manufacturers to further increase the filling speed of filling equipment, increase equipment output and production efficiency, and meet higher production requirements while ensuring filling quality.

In addition, the filling equipment must also be multi-functional. As we all know, there are many market segments in the beverage industry. In recent years, the personalized trend of the market has become more and more obvious. Compared with highly specialized filling equipment, multifunctional filling equipment that can flexibly switch between functions is more favored by manufacturers. At present, some equipment has been able to realize the filling conversion of glass containers and plastic containers, the filling conversion of carbonated beverages and non-gas beverages, the conversion between hot filling and cold filling, and so on.

In the past two years, with the improvement of domestic residents' living standards, the beverage market has shown an increasingly stronger ability to "absorb gold". The continuous development of the beverage industry has brought greater market space for filling equipment. Nowadays, the domestic filling machine manufacturing industry has entered a stage of rapid development, with mature technical performance and reduced equipment costs. At the same time, the equipment is moving towards high speed and multi-function.