Lovely Drinks - carbonation & filling

Lovely Drinks is an award-winning organic producer of artisan sodas and juices, based near Bristol.

Founders Rick (right) and Victoria Freeman began making elderflower champagne using an old recipe of Rick's mums as their inspiration and elderflower from their garden. It was only meant to be a hobby but the drink proved too good to keep to themselves and so they began producing on a small scale and selling to local markets and food festivals. They experimented by adding roses which proved to be a popular flavour combination. Demand and customer loyalty grew, and they now produce a wide range of soft drinks, including garden lemonade, rhubarb tonic water and cucumber and mint fizz, using locally sourced, minimal ingredients. Lovely Drinks has won numerous awards, including Great Taste awards (20 awards), Taste of the West Awards and Bristol Good Food Awards. In addition to UK sales, they now export to Rome and Hong Kong.

The Project

Rick and Victoria have been customers of ours for many years and were already using filling, capping (as shown right) and labelling machines supplied by us, in addition to stainless steel tanks used for product chilling. The speed of carbonation, however, was holding their production back and was quite slow and labour intensive, so Rick was looking for a carbonator which would give them consistent carbonation and, at the same time, add a level of automation to their existing process. Production methods at that time included using a filler and in-bottle carbonator (stand-alone machines). Separate operators were required for each different step of the bottling and carbonation process (i.e., rinsing, filling, carbonation, capping, etc.).

We discussed the production requirements with Rick and recommended our Vigo manufactured 2 head carbonator and counter pressure filler (right). We invited Rick to Vigo to see the machine in action and were pleased to supply them with the machine.

Production using this machine allows Lovely Drinks to package their carbonated products into bottles at speeds of around 350 bottles per hour, with only 2 production operatives, whilst achieving consistent carbonation levels and fill heights on all bottles. The machine also allows the flexibility of carbonating small batch sizes on a lower budget [this is difficult to achieve using the alternative in-tank method of carbonation where batch sizes are always restricted by the size of pressure tank and a much larger budget is required for all the necessary equipment, including pressure tanks].