Coffee Beans

Whole coffee beans are hard, irregular and noisy in a forming tube — and they keep degassing after roasting. Bulk density shifts with origin, roast level and bean size, so the same volume does not always give the same weight. Freshly roasted beans release CO₂ for days: a sealed bag with no relief path swells, while a bag that lets ambient air in trades that gas for oxygen and loses aroma. Beans also break — dropped onto steel from height, or caught by the sealing jaws, they chip, and chips become fines and dust that collect at the bottom of the pack. Gentle volumetric dosing prevents cracked beans, which is why a coffee beans filling machine is built around volumetric cups or buckets rather than an auger. An auger meters powder by shearing it through a screw; with a hard granular product it grinds and fractures the beans instead of moving them. Piston fillers belong to liquids and pastes. Free flowing granules of this size fall cleanly and repeatably by volume, so the dosing unit only has to open, release and close without pinching. Drop heights are kept short and transfer surfaces gentle for the same reason. Where declared weight has to be held tightly against shifting bulk density, a weighing stage is used instead of a fixed volume. The format for whole beans is the pillow bag made on a VFFS machine: one-way-valve-ready film lets CO₂ escape without admitting oxygen, and nitrogen flush before the top seal protects the aroma. Pillow bags on VFFS lines are the standard retail format — 250 g and 500 g shelf packs, and 1 kg bags for cafés and HoReCa buyers. Stick pack and sachet formats do exist in coffee, but they belong to ground and instant coffee in single portions; whole beans are not sold that way. For this product a coffee beans packaging machine means VFFS rather than a stick pack machine. The working dose range is 250-1000 g per bag. This is a single-tube VFFS format, so the cycle rate is the bag rate: one cycle, one bag, up to 60 bags per minute, with 35 per minute at the slow end. There is no lane multiplication here as on multi-lane stick pack machines: the cycle count is the pack count. Where a given line sits inside that band depends on bag length and dose weight, film behaviour, the dwell needed for nitrogen flush, and how the finished bag is handled downstream. Mentpack packs this product on the VB family: VB, VB-MINI, VB-PLUS and VB-Q. Model choice follows bag size, target output and how much nitrogen flush and film handling the format requires. Typical users are roasting plants and private-label co-packers: specialty roasters moving from hand-weighed bags to a line, roasters running retail and HoReCa formats side by side, and exporters shipping beans with the roast intact. The same configuration serves other free flowing granules such as nuts and seeds.