How It All Started
Coca Cola is a type of soft drink which was first sold at a drug store because of it’s alleged medicinal value. Then, pharmacists served it up in different flavours of carbonated water. It became so popular that buyers wanted to buy them in bottles and take them home. This, fellow soft drinks lover, was the beginning of the soft drinks industry.
Inside the Factory
Even though the plastic bottles are made newly from the factories, the soft drink plants still cleans them by turning them upside down and flushing the insides of the bottles with filtered water made on site. To drain, the bottles are turned right side up.
In the mixing room, production begins with the first recipe – filtered water – which makes up 86% of the drink , and the rest 14% being syrup. Each syrup recipe is a combination of carefully measured ingredients – natural and artificial colouring and flavouring – and several types of sugar, one of which is fructose – extracted from beets, corn or sugar cane. This machine mixes and releases the right proportion of syrup to filtered water and the final outcome is what you get in the bottles, well, minus the bubbles.
How Do The Bubbles Come In?
This syrup+water combination is then passed into a pressurised tank called a carbonator, where an injection of carbon dioxide infuses the drink with gas bubbles which gives it that refreshing taste. The carbonated soft drink now travels to the reservoir of the bottling machine on a conveyor belt, which removes air from each bottle and fills it with cola.
The filled bottle moves on to the capping machine, where the caps are released down a chute by filtered air, then the machine twists the cap onto the part of the bottle called the crimp (the narrow opening at the neck of the bottle), and intertwines the cap and the threads of the crimp (those raised, circular grooves at the neck of the bottle) tightly to hermetically seal the bottle ( to seal so tightly that no air can enter or escape)
Everything is All About Labels!
The bottles then move on to the labelling machine, which applies cold glue to one metal plate after another, this plate then grabs a label, and applies it to the bottle. The smooth edges of the label are then brushed down against the bottles to ensure that they stick well.
What About Glass Bottles?
Elsewhere in the factory, a machine called the encaser unloads cases of refillable glass bottles that have come back to the factory, and the cases are passed on to the case washing machine. The dirty bottles head toward the bottle washing machine, where devices called cells line them up in rows of 16. Each bottle tilts and enters the machine neck first, while a combination of powerful water jet and soap removes dirt and germs, and another round of water jet rinses off any trace of soap.
From there, they pass in front of a neon inspection light and workers pull any problem bottle off the line while the good ones head over to the bottling machine and are filled with soft drink as detailed earlier. But these glass bottles, unlike the plastic bottles have old-fashioned bottle caps (also known as crowns), and as each cap drops onto the bottle, the machine twists it tight, creating an air-tight seal.
Is It Good Enough For Consumption?
The factory ensures that it is by taking a sample from each production run for quality control testing . The technician checks such things as the dilution ratio of syrup to water, the carbonation level, and the air-tight seal. They also analyse the purity of the drinking container, and run the sample through a filter paper. This is put in a petri dish containing the nutrients needed to grow micro-organisms, and incubated at a precise temperature to observe if any bacteria will grow.
Once this has been done, and all quality control assessments are satisfied, they are passed on to shipping cases where they are stored for distribution until it finally gets to you whether bought at a shop or in traffic.
