Hello,
My company is pursuing a change towards compostable stand-up pouches for our products (capsules/powders). We are a very small company and most of our packaging/bottling process is manual. Currently, plastic or glass bottles are placed under a pill counter by hand, where they are then sealed by hand as well.
Stand-up pouches add the challenge of quickly opening them up and standing the upright underneath the pill counter. Fiddling with the pouch to get it open takes a few seconds more than simply grabbing a bottle. The pouches are so light when empty that they can be difficult to stand up unless the bottom gusset is fully expanded. The seconds lost to mess with these pouches translates to significant drops in production capacity when extrapolated across an entire shift.
My question is, does anyone know of any solutions to quickly opening/filling these pouches in a low-budget, manual setting? It has been difficult to find tools suited for this purpose. I can think of some improvised setup that may work...but I'm certain that we're not the first small company to work with these kinds of pouches. Does anyone have any experience?
Thank you!