STiR coffee and tea magazine

48 STiR coffee and tea / Issue 6, 2019 (December / January 2020) The pyramid tea bag, a tetrahedral shape with greatly in- creased contact surface area, has extended the range and quality of teas that can be included. (It increasingly benefits from air knotting aesthetically as well as functionally.) Ultrasound weigh- ing and vibrating feeding in of large leaf tea and slow-flowing heavy herbs and fruit pieces are extending lower volume spe- cialty teas as an addition to the high volume commodity market. Tea pouches and tea socks improve infusion rate. One of the impacts of the material and shape constraint and extension of limitations is that there is no standard tea bag machine. Some are multifunctional and modular, allowing easy retrofit and upgrade. Others can handle a variety of, say, bag materials but be tailored to pyramids only. Speeds are critical for the mass market basic bags and range widely. Machines under $10,000 offer around 100 bags a minute output and those with an extra zero on the price tab 400 per minute. Some machines add envelope packaging and variable count boxing, with digital printing – here, again, bio pushes the limits and applies com- postable inks. Seal thread and tag The main area where plastics have become a strategic concern could hardly be seen as other than trivial detail: sealing the bag. It needs to keep its shape and stay firmly closed when exposed to hot water and steeping time. The most effective sealant has been polypropylene. It's plastic. The amount applied to a bag is tiny but it undermines the immense progress to producing a fully biodegradable and com- postable bag. That achievement has been announced by Clipper and reinforced by a collaborative industry consortium, OSC 2 ("One Step Forward to Organic, Sustainable Community" – hence OSC squared.) It is a signal of just how serious the plas- tics issue is for our planet. The Great Pacific patch, one of the five largest oceanic plastic junkyards, is twice the size of Texas and three times that of France. Polypropylene won't disappear from tea bags because of its effectiveness and integral interdependence with other compo- nents of the assembly for many firms and teas. But the machines are creating new options, heat sealing in particular. Ultrasonic sealing vibrates the bag at a frequency that creates a frictional heat that melts and then welds the two surfaces. The machines are significantly more expensive. Next step: thread and tab, as discussed Label and package Many functions at the end of the tea bag assembly line are can- didates for full, partial or minimal automation. Boxing bags and wrapping them is one instance. Labels, bar codes, envelopes, and dividers are others. Quality control of faulty bags, weight errors, and waste fall into this category of process-driven not necessarily automation-dependent. "Zero waste to landfill" has become a core target here and involves a fusion of management commitment, process man- agement, safety and certification compliance and machine sup- port. Bigelow is one firm that has made this a sustainable eco- nomic and social success factor. Tetley's zero waste Eaglescliffe factory is reported to produce close to 300 million bags a week, 30% of the US market. It has 60 branded bags each with its own manufacturing, packaging and quality features. Unilever's equivalent Dubai complex, currently the world's largest, blends teas grown in 15 countries to make 6 billion Lipton tea bags a year, 1.2 million every hour. The main contributions of machines here is in digital print- ing, compostable inks and physical cutting, folding, stacking, wrapping, etc. Robots are not yet on the factory floor but are certainly peeking in the door. All in all, tea bag making is increasing in its innovation and variety. It is a growth market, with revenues estimated to in- crease by more than 5% a year, driven by regional dynamics. Today, they are around $40 billion worldwide. China and India are seeing a substantial shift from loose to bagged tea. Tea bags market share is relatively small in the US because of preferences for iced and ready to drink teas. In the UK's declining market for basic teas, they amount to 96% of the total cup volume and 90% in Germany. In Russia, the shift to bags is marked and they now amount to 56% of sales, at premium prices. Globally, bags add up to 12%. In the equipment market, Alibaba estimates that there are 1,000-3,000 suppliers of the machines and materials reviewed here. Tsubakimoto Kogyo's TPB-200ES, known as the Twinkle pyramid teabag machine Teepack's Perfecta New Generation outputs 420 tea bags per minute

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