I started my career more than a decade ago in the pyramid tea packaging space. At the time, pyramid tea bags were the latest upcoming trend in the market. It was relatively new to the market and only a very handful of players were working with this. The distinguished advantage the pyramid tea bag had was the fact that it could hold big leaf tea and herbs.

 

 

There was a growing demand by customers to pack herbs into the pyramid tea bag as they wanted to differentiate themselves in the market by providing a premium product that was not offered yet in the market at the time. Some of these demands were to pack difficult herbs such as chamomile and lemon grass. However, anyone in the tea industry will agree with me that Greek Mountain Herbs are the most difficult herbs to pack into pyramid tea bag. Therefore I would like to share the experience Tecpacking had and the approach the company took to pack Greek Mountain herbs.

 

 

In 2013 we got the challenge and opportunity to pack Greek Mountain Herbs in the Tecpacking machine for a customer called Manos. Myself and my partner Arjen from Tulppack in Netherlands took on this challenge head on. Manos was well aware that this herb is one of the most difficult ones to pack. Therefore they had already done some treatment to the Greek Mountain Herbs to make sure it becomes smaller and easy to pack. This was a fantastic initiative by the customer to help mitigate the issue of packing. However, we noticed two issues with this, i.e. the dropping time is longer than other tea - so it was difficult to pack the filter bag into envelop. The other issue was that the herb is light, and it sticks on the paper, which affects the sealing.

 

 

To solve these issues, Tecpacking conducted many tests to try control the filling time while amending the size of the bag. Once we did all the required adjustments to our machine we took it to Greece to install it in the factory. However, once we installed and ran the machine we came into a few practical issues from the customers point of view. We then looked at the issues together and solved the technical problems that came about together as a team. We were successful and Manos were supportive to make this successful. Manos has now been operating the Tecpacking machines for over 10 years and have been quite popular in Europe. We feel very proud to have enabled Manos operate in this space.

As time passed by many developments had come through and packaging the Greek Mountain Herb leaf into the pyramid tea bag. This was another big challenge in the tea packaging industry. We decided that we wanted to take this challenge head on as well. The issue with Greek Mountain Herb leaves were that it is very light with a plethora of tiny fuzz that makes dosing almost impossible. We worked around packing the Greek Mountain Herb leaf with our old tea bag packing machine model E8, but failed multiple times. Then in the mid of 2019 we introduced our high speed pyramid tea bag packing machine, TP-P100 which can pack 100 bags a minute for normal tea. We took this high performing TP-P100 machine to the fachpack exhibition in Germany with my partner Arjen from Tulppack. The machine was recognized by many professionals from the tea industry and some were in disbelief that a small company based in China was able to create a miracle machine that has the capability to produce 100 bags a minute.

 

 

With the TP-P100 machine we re-attempted to pack the Greek Mountain Herb leaf again. We succeeded but the speed was only 30-40 bags per minute. This positive indication was more than sufficient for us to work on the machine further to enhance production speed for this herb. We finally managed to increase the speed of the machine to 60-70 bags per minute for the Greek Mountain Herb leaf packaging. Sheer dedication and commitment to succeed enabled Tecpacking to be go beyond to reach greater heights. Please click on the following link to see the machine perform: https://www.teepacking.com/products-detail-614592

 

 

The purpose of this article is to educate our colleagues on how difficult packing Greek Mountain Herbs were. If you have any other technical queries to ask us about packaging Greek Mountain Herbs feel free to reach out to us (myself from Tecpacking or Arjen from Tulppack) and we will be able to help you get a better understanding. Our goal is to help our customers with their unique packaging requirements with the intention of growing in the market together.

Thank you