Mike Hardy is showing me an aseptic filler. "There are only two speeds to this — 0 and 600 bottles a minute," he says. I watch a blur of bottles enter one end of the machine from an overhead con-veyor, whirl from carousel to carousel and exit the other end. In a matter of seconds, the bottles have been sterilized, filled and capped.Hardy is the director of operations of HP Hood's Sacramento, Calif., dairy plant. Hood finished installing the aseptic filler in 2012. The facility processes ultra-high-temperature (UHT) dairy and nondairy beverages (including milk, cream and almond milk) in extended shelf life packages and aseptic packages.According to the Food and Drug Administration, high-temperature short-time pasteurization "is important to the dairy industry because of the operating efficiencies that it affords. Properly operated, these units allow a high volume of production in a minimum of processing space."
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