Soy Sauce

Soy sauce is thin, dark, salty and staining — a leak in distribution is a disaster shelfful. The difficulty is not moving the product but keeping it inside the pack. Low viscosity finds any weakness in a seal, and the dark pigment makes one failed sachet visible across a whole carton. Salt works on films and on wetted machine parts over time, so salt-resistant films, tight seal parameters and precise small-volume dosing are what make the classic food-service sachet work. A thin liquid also wicks into the sealing band when the dosing stroke and the jaw timing are not cleanly separated, and sauce caught in the seal is the usual reason a leak shows up days after packing. A soy sauce filling machine doses by positive-displacement piston through a shut-off nozzle. The piston draws a measured volume, delivers it into the pack, and the nozzle closes at the end of the stroke so the jet is cut without dripping or stringing between cycles. Low viscosity is what this arrangement is built around: the liquid fills fast and levels at the bottom of the pack, so the limit is not how fast it flows but how cleanly the last drop is cut. Dosing is timed while the film is held, so nothing splashes up into the seal band. Nozzles, seals and the wetted path are specified for chloride resistance and laid out to drain, because dried soy sauce leaves salt and pigment behind; CIP of the dosing line belongs to normal changeover. On the pack side the product runs as stick pack and as sachet. The stick pack suits delivery, catering and travel: narrow, flat, opened with one hand next to chopsticks or cutlery, and easy to drop into a meal box. The three- and four-side-seal sachet is the classic food-service portion, with a wider seal frame, a dependable tear notch and a shape that stacks in dispensers and bulk cartons. Wider portions run on the same soy sauce sachet packaging machine with fewer lanes. Dosing is 10-25 ml per pack. Output follows pack width, because these are multi-lane machines and the lane count is set by how wide the pack is. The MSM1200 reaches up to 960 packs per minute on a narrow pack with 12 lanes, and the same machine on a wider pack runs 6 lanes and up to 480 packs per minute. Cycle rate and packs per minute are not the same figure: packs per minute is cycles multiplied by lanes. Machines that run this product: 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), SPM1200 (7-12). Typical customers are soy sauce producers and sauce co-packers supplying QSR and sushi chains, delivery kitchens, airline and hotel catering, and retail multipacks, together with private-label packers running several thin sauces on one soy sauce packaging machine.