Packaging for No / Low Alcohol Beverages
No / Low Alcohol beverages present a much more significant challenge to pack than alcoholic ones, as alcohol is a natural preservative against the effect of microbial agents. Combined with the presence of sugar in the drink, it can be a fight to stop yeast and bacteria damaging the product – often incredibly quickly.
Whenever sugar is in a solution, it wants to ferment to become alcohol. The introduction of even an incredibly tiny number of yeast cells can result in the drink starting to perish in as little as a week. Likewise, there are many other biological processes which can spoil the drink, such as acetic / lactic acid creation.
Single-serve packaging makes this challenge even harder, owing to the higher surface area of the product and the challenge with ensuring no contaminants are introduced during packaging. Traditional treatments which might work well for sterilising a glass bottle may damage alternative materials; likewise, the most delicate of drinks cannot be pasteurised without strongly altering the flavour.
Adding chemical preservatives is one way to go, but consumers don’t want to be picking the healthy option, only to find it has to be stuffed full of chemical stabilisers such as DMDC, Sorbate and Sulphites to stop it going off – that isn’t well-aligned with their aims of picking the no/low product in the first place!
ecoSIP is the only small-format, single-serve process which works just as well on non-alcoholic products as it does on alcoholic ones, without any alteration to the product – we add nothing and remove nothing.
How? Well our process is unique and patent-pending, but it’s a combination of a huge number of things, such as everything being carried out in clean room conditions, but also meticulous cleaning, sanitisation and validation processes. It’s the full combination of our four years of R&D and experimentation.
Our low Oxygen Transfer Rate (how fast oxygen penetrates into your drink) also preserves delicate aromas without needing to add vast quantities of anti-oxidants to your drink, again keeping it more natural, authentic and fresh.
All in all, when combined with the practical and environmental benefits of ecoSIP, there’s no better way to pack up your no/low beverages, whether for trade sampling, letterbox gifting or retail.