Sugar

White sugar is the classic free-flowing granule: fast, predictable and ideal for high-speed volumetric dosing — until humidity clumps it or a crystal lands in the seal. Sugar is hygroscopic, so an open hopper in a damp room is enough to start bridging and caking; once that begins, the filled volume drifts while the machine appears to run exactly as before. The second difficulty is mechanical. Crystals are hard, abrasive and they bounce: a single grain caught between the sealing jaws leaves a channel that opens the pack later in the case. Dry handling and seal-zone protection are therefore the two things a sugar packaging machine is judged on, well before top speed enters the discussion. Dosing is volumetric for almost every grade. Free-flowing crystals fill a measuring chamber repeatably and their bulk density stays stable through the shift, so a volumetric cup or dosing wheel gives an accurate fill at high cycle rates. An auger is the alternative for the finer end — icing and powdered grades — where flow becomes cohesive and volumetric filling loses repeatability. At the top of the dose range, where a portion becomes a catering bag rather than a single serve, weighing takes over. Whichever method is chosen, the sugar filling machine is built to keep the product path dry and to clear stray crystals away from the sealing area before the jaws close. Formats follow the market. The stick pack remains the highest-volume single-serve product in hospitality: narrow, cheap to fill at high lane counts, easy to tear, and bought in the largest quantities by hotels, cafés, airlines and coffee roasters. A sugar sachet packaging machine covers the four-side-seal pouch, still widely used for catering and retail multipacks and more tolerant of coarser crystal and wider doses. For household and bulk kitchen packs, VFFS pillow bags carry the larger fills, where weight and not the portion decides the pack. Doses run from 1 to 3000 g, from a stick pack portion to a bag for professional kitchens. Output depends on the pack width, because lane count changes with it: a CSM1200 running a narrow stick pack in 12 lanes reaches up to 960 packs per minute, while the same machine in a wide pack works with 6 lanes and delivers up to 480 packs per minute. A single figure is therefore meaningless without the pack dimensions. Machines that run sugar: ARTISTICK (1-5 lanes), CSM600 (3-7), CSM1200 (6-12), HSM (1-3), ISM400 (2-5), SPM320 (1-8), SPM800 (4-12) and SPM1200 (7-12) for stick pack and sachet work, with the VB, VB-MINI, VB-Q and VB-PLUS series covering the larger bag formats at the upper end of the dose range. Typical users are sugar refineries and packers, private-label co-packers, hospitality and HORECA suppliers, and coffee and tea brands that pack their own portion sticks.