PETpla.net Insider 04 / 2019

BOTTLING / FILLING PET planet Insider Vol. 20 No. 04/19 www.petpla.net 46 Dry aseptic PET lines The world’s largest liquid dairy producer, Yili, strives to provide Chinese consumers with high-quality, nutritional, healthy, and innovative dairy products. Their continuously growing sales demonstrate how they manage to be successful in differentiating their brand with the help of premium dairies. PET packaging can help them advance as a business by offering new consumer experiences compared with the traditional carton format while allowing a more flexible production. Confidence in PET benefits Yili is a strong believer in the potential of PET as a packaging material, as it perfectly matches the Chinese consumers’ expectations by being user-friendly, shatterproof, re-sealable, and recyclable. It also provides freedom in bottle design to differentiate their dairy brand on the Chinese supermarket shelves. Perhaps more importantly, PET offers great benefits in terms of physical product and food barrier protection, therefore preserving nutritional and sensorial properties of yogurts at all stages – from production, storage, and shipment to distribution. More- over, the closure tightness adds to PET’s convenience even without the use of aluminium foil. All of these reasons supported the Yili strategic direction to partially switch their production from carton to PET bottles with the aim of intro- ducing innovative packages: a great pioneering move in the Chinese dairy market. As part of this change, the Ambrosial Greek Yogurt, packaged in PET single serve bottles, has been highly popular since its launch. Con- sidering the growing market demand for this premium drinking yogurt, paired with a willingness to innovate the brand, Yili decided to invest in a couple of new aseptic PET packaging lines. This is when Sidel came in due to the solid and trustful partnership built between the two companies in the past. The team at Yili appreciated Sidel’s insights and inputs on bever- age market trends, packaging design, and PET aseptic packaging expertise, all proving instrumental for the leading Chinese dairy brand. PET barrier qualified for 5-months shelf life With Sidel’s support, Yili was the first one to bottle Ambrosial Greek Yogurt in PET for ambient distribu- tion – a product which had previously been offered in cartons. Sidel and Yili collaborated to fully qualify the PET barrier properties and make sure which type of PET bottles would allow Yili’s yogurts to retain their fresh taste and vitamin content. This is particu- larly important as this product’s quality can be easily compromised by the effects of light, oxygen, and tempera- ture. All these considerations justified the requirement for full barrier opaque packaging. Sidel’s experts in liquid dairies and packaging performed a range of labo- ratory tests to determine the behav- iour of different liquid dairy products (yogurt, UHT white milk) in several PET barrier solutions (PET multi- layers and mono-layer with different rates of TiO 2 ). The scientists evalu- ated different caps’ opacity to achieve the optimal light and oxygen barrier and ensure the product’s stability with- out any alteration in terms of taste or colour. All these analyses confirmed that the combination of approved bar-