PET bottle for drinking yoghurt and milk-based mixed products

The dairy firm Molkerei Gropper, Bissingen, Germany, took a purposeful decision in favour of the PET bottle when positioning its milk-based products in plastic containers.
There were various reasons why the dairy opted for PET and not for HDPE. First of all, PET bottles (in contrast to their HDPE counterparts) can be produced inline on a Contiform S to match the filler’s own output. Otherwise an interim buffering system would have been required for each of the five bottle sizes. Moreover, HDPE bottles have to be sealed if they are to be leak-proof. And the very sharp-edged mouth of the HDPE bottle is not particularly conducive to encouraging customers to drink their milk directly from the bottle. A crucially fundamental consideration for future line planning. So when the second aseptic line, ordered from Krones as a complete-package job, is installed, a system featuring dry sterilisation will be used, since hydrogen peroxide has been employed as a disinfectant for more than 20 years,  and the procedures for handling it are familiar.
For the first time, Gropper is using a PET-Asept D system for disinfecting the bottles, which employs gaseous hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) to provide an absolutely dry sterilisation process without any condensation. The advantage of this dry sterilisation process is that it utilises moderate temperatures, which enables the reaction time with gaseous H2O2 to be extended at will without damaging the PET containers.