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Basque cider maker Petritegi has launched «Petritegi 0,0 sin filtrar», an alcohol-free cider that Financial Food presented on 2 October as the first unfiltered 0.0 Basque cider. The launch coincides with the company's 500 years of history. The drink starts from a blend of 15 cider apple varieties, goes through controlled fermentation and then a dealcoholisation process designed to preserve its structure. It is not filtered, so it keeps the natural cloudiness of cider, and it has no added sugars. According to the company, it is the result of two years of R&D.
It is a product launch, but it is also a plant launch. When an alcohol-free reference shares a line, equipment or people with the traditional one, packaging has to deal with things that did not exist before.
What it means for a packaging plant
The first thing that changes is the risk. An alcoholic cider with the 0.0 label is not a cosmetic fault: it reaches people who cannot or do not want to drink alcohol, such as a driver or a pregnant woman, and it can end in a product recall. If both versions use the same bottle and the same glass, the label and the cap are the only things that tell them apart. And at a changeover, all it takes is one reel of the previous labels left in the labeller.
That is why the check cannot depend on someone looking at a bottle at start-up. A camera after the labeller can check the label, the «0.0» text or a code on every bottle and compare it with the recipe loaded at that moment; if it does not match, it rejects the bottle and raises an alert. The same goes for the date and batch code: that they are there, that they are legible and that they belong to that run. Our page on machine vision explains how 100 % of containers are inspected.
The second is the product itself. An unfiltered cider is cloudy and may have sediment, and that varies from batch to batch. A fill-level or foreign-body check set up for a clear liquid can mistake that cloudiness for a defect and reject good bottles: more false rejects and more waste. It is worth tuning the inspection with real bottles from several batches before start-up and, if classic vision cannot tell them apart reliably, considering a deep learning model trained on those samples.
And the third is the process. Dealcoholisation is one more stage between fermentation and filling, with its own parameters. Keeping that data together with the line data, by batch, makes it possible to answer quickly the question any auditor or distributor will ask: how do you know this bottle is 0.0?
Four keys to packing a 0.0 reference
- Label against recipe: check on every bottle that the label matches the loaded reference, with automatic rejection if it does not.
- Changeover with a checklist: remove the previous labels and caps and record the first good bottle of the new run.
- Inspection tuned to the product: level and foreign-body thresholds tested with unfiltered cider from several batches.
- Traceability by batch: date, batch code and process data linked, so a complaint can be answered in minutes.
Five centuries of craft and a new reference: the cider stays the same; what changes is everything that has to be checked around it. If you are preparing a similar launch, let's talk.
