STiR coffee and tea magazine

30 STiR coffee and tea / Issue 4, 2017 (August / September) L By Anne-Marie Hardie The Original Single Serve ong before the first tea pod, capsule, cartridge, or k-cup there was the tea bag (also known as the tea dip). While controversy over who was the initial cre- ator of the bag remains, one thing is certain, the public immediately responded to this convenient, mess-free format. Beginning in 1908 several companies experimented with a variety of materials to discover which produced the best infusion. Silk gave way to hand-filled cheesecloth, gauze, and muslin which were popular but expensive. Then, in 1930, William Herman- son developed and sold his heat-sealed paper tea bags to the Salada Company. Strings and tabs enhanced the utility but the design was so practical it remains dominate even now. Over the years, the format has evolved, in 1952, Thomas Lipton patented the flo- thru bag and in 1992, Tetley, launched the round tea bag. More recently foil cylinders and stir sticks filled with tea Silk tetrahedral (pyramids) that afforded much greater space for tea leaves to ex- pand were introduced by Brooke Bond/PG Tips in 1996. Innovations have since in- volved a range of compostable and biodegradable papers and polylactides. Efficiency mandate Mainly focused on bagging (cut, tea, curl) CTC tea, once settled on a format, compa- nies seek machinery to maximize their output, at minimal cost. The largest factories can produce billions of tea bags annually. "One of the current challenges for manufacturers of teabag packaging machines is to meet both the demand and market requirements," said Guillermo Mai, president, IMA Mai S.A, Buenos Aries, Argentina. A leading supplier of single chamber tea bag machines, Mai S.A. is responding to market demand for equipment that improves productivity using faster machinery with increased automation and performance. Their latest innovation, the EC24, does exactly that. Equipped with automatic cartooning, this machinery fills, tags, seals, and packs up to 240 tea bags a minute. "The future for tea equipment is to get faster and highly automatic machines that provide a produc- tion with extremely high yields and have a conception in design that allows them to be flexible to achieve the teabag with its final packaging without making changes to the machine," said Mai. Knit PLA tea bag

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