Conditioner

Hair conditioner is heavier than shampoo and shear-sensitive: aggressive pumping can break its emulsion. What leaves the mixing tank as a smooth cream can reach the pack thinner, grainy or separated, and the damage often shows only after the pack has sat in a warehouse. The product is also thick enough to cling: it does not release cleanly from a nozzle, it strings, and a tail dragged across the film contaminates the seal band. On a single-use pack the sealed area is only a few millimetres wide, so that residue decides whether the pack holds or weeps inside a shipping carton. Entrapped air is the third issue, because an aerated dose looks right but under-delivers by weight. A conditioner filling machine at Mentpack is therefore built around servo-driven piston dosing. Gentle piston filling preserves texture, while a shut-off nozzle keeps the high-viscosity product out of the seal jaws. The piston draws product into a cylinder and pushes it out again at a controlled speed, so the shear the emulsion sees stays low and repeatable, and the dose is fixed mechanically by stroke length rather than by timing a flow, which matters when viscosity moves with batch and room temperature. The nozzle closes at the end of the stroke and cuts the string instead of letting it drip onto the sealing area. Piston bore, nozzle opening and seal materials are matched to the formulation, and product-contact parts are stainless and CIP-ready. The single-use sachet is the classic format, covering hotel amenities, salons and trial-size retail, and there seal cosmetics matter as much as seal strength: a conditioner sachet packaging machine is judged on print registration and seal appearance as well as on leak tests. The stick pack carries the same single dose in a narrower shape that is easy to hold in a wet hand and tears open in one movement. Larger doses go into pillow bags on VFFS formats, where the pack is the selling unit rather than an insert. Doses run from 5 to 15 ml. Output depends on lane count, and lane count follows pack width rather than the machine alone: an MSM1200 running a narrow pack across 12 lanes reaches up to 960 packs per minute, while the same machine on a wide pack runs 6 lanes and up to 480 packs per minute. Film width, dose and pack drawing are therefore agreed before any output figure is confirmed. Conditioner runs on ARTISTICK (1-5 lanes), HSM (1-3), ISM400 (2-5), ISM600 (3-7), MSM800 (4-10), MSM1200 (6-12), SPM320 (1-8), SPM800 (4-12) and SPM1200 (7-12). Buyers are cosmetics and personal-care manufacturers, private-label and contract packers supplying hotel amenity programmes, salon distributors and retail sampling. A conditioner packaging machine is rarely bought alone: the same line usually handles shampoo, shower gel and body lotion with a format and dose change, which is how one machine covers a whole personal-care portfolio.