Filler in the cleanroom for soy sauce

Kikkoman Foods Europe B.V., the first soy sauce production facility in Europe, which started operation a good seven years ago in Holland, was supplied a filling line rated at 9,000 bph by Krones as a turnkey job.
High hygienic safety is provided by a single-channel rotary Variojet rinser that is BLOC-synchronised with an Isofill vacuum filler in a Class-10,000 enclosed cleanroom. In microbiological terms, soy sauce is a very stable product, but the cleanroom with its HEPA filters is intended to protect it against contaminants from the surrounding air. The rinser can be run with either air or water. For the filler, precisely identical fill heights were a major priority, so a vacuum filler as a level-controlled model was chosen. After filling, the low-vacuum conditions in the ring bowl hold the product in the return gas path or push it back into the ring bowl which leads to high fill level accuracy. The moving valve parts had to be made of a titanium alloy, to ensure a longer useful lifetime. The ring bowl, too, has been made from extra-strong stainless steel. There is a CIP-cleaning option, but a cleaning procedure with water and superheated steam is currently sufficient. The screw caps are fed to the SV closer into the cleanroom from outside.
Kikkoman handles a total of five different glass bottles and one PET bottle as a small container. The new Krones line handles three bottle shapes: 150 ml with and without a dispenser, and a 250-ml size.