Average Product Loss for Beverage Manufacture

I apologise if this is in the wrong section.

We're currently working on our product loss during manufacture to determine a realistic acceptable target (historically the R&D department have allocated a 20kg loss regardless of product type or batch size).

Would anyone working in (or have worked in) the beverage industry be willing to share their targets when it comes to product loss during the filling process? I realise that depending on the product, pack size, fill process, etc this will probably vary significantly however we're hoping it will give us a good base line to compare what we're currently seeing.

Any and all help is greatly appreciated.

This is difficult to speculate on as it's so very dependent on your equipment.

For liquid beverage products we'd estimate a loss of the volume of the pipework in the line, plus 0.1% of the batch.

In reality we achieve a better figure, and some of it isn't actually a "loss", but rather takes account of the actual average fill being slightly higher than the nominal quoted size for each pack, but this approach means we never under-cost production efficiency. If you're using a pigging system then the line volume loss would obviously be considerably less.

It's possible to calculate the production loss, but it's imperative to know your production line, its piping, and its equipment from the beginning to the end. And equally important, is the viscosity and density of the product. Once you use water as your standard, it's easy to calculate its effect for any other products you have in the production line.