Hi Ryan. I was searching through the forum and found your response. I am looking into various co-manufacturers for a soda (glass bottle) and none clean their caps before application. I am starting to think it must be industry practice, at least for small plants. The product is cold-filled, high acid, carbonated, and contains preservatives. Since there’s no heat step, I’d prefer a facility that cleans the caps—but perhaps the preservatives and other factors make it less of a concern. Any insights would be appreciated.
Thank you.
*Alert Zombie thread!!!*
The acidity bit is important in my view. There are some high acid applications where cap sterilisation will not be as important. Carbonation also is a hurdle factor to microbiological (mostly yeast and mould) growth and it also contains preservatives. It sounds like the product is very low risk to me and so I'd suspect cap sterilisation is not required. Of course, common sense and keeping them covered before use would be sensible.
To come at it another way, a literature search or advice from an authoritative body might be helpful about what pH the yeasts and moulds which concern you would grow? There may be an industry body for drinks in the US with information like this for you.
Like the reply above, I've only ever worked with or seen packaging disinfection / sterilisation with H2O2 or PAA in aseptic operations. Often these are for ambient items with moderately low pH or closer to neutral pH. If I'm honest, having seen a few plants now with these kind of applications? They slightly terrify me. There's so much more that could go wrong and I have had foods or drinks packed in this kind of plant with mould. They go wrong more than you'd think because mostly people don't follow all the steps and sometimes they can be circumvented. I'm far more of a fan of pasteurisation in bottle or can where that's possible but not always possible with PET etc. It's probably because I was "brought up" with traditional high care / high risk manufacturing where some of what aseptic processing does is just "muddier" for my liking. Also there are H&S risks of using PAA or hydrogen peroxide so I'd avoid if you can.
