Lights-out factories on the horizon as Chinese liquid food equipment goes smart

The China International Brew and Beverage Technology Exhibition kicked off in October at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre. During the four-day event, Newamstar, a leading Chinese intelligent equipment manufacturer for the liquid food industry, presented its cutting-edge technological achievements at Booth W4-C16.

At this year's exhibition, Newamstar unveiled an all-round "lights-out factory" solution designed to enable unmanned operations across five core procedures: production changeover, quality inspection, ingredient blending, material handling and truck loading. The innovative solution paves the way for fully automated production in liquid food manufacturing plants. A lights-out factory represents a highly intelligent manufacturing model that requires minimal or zero human intervention and can operate continuously without manual supervision, emerging as a key development trend in industrial intelligent upgrading.

Building on its solid technical accumulation, Newamstar pioneered the integrated production and warehousing concept for the industry back in 2015. By adopting self-developed closed-loop technologies, the company realizes seamless connectivity between production and warehousing workflows. This mature technical system has been widely applied in multiple turnkey factory projects, laying a solid foundation for the newly launched lights-out factory solution.

Highlighted at the exhibition booth is Newamstar's integrated blow-molding, labeling, filling and capping unit, boasting a high hourly capacity of 48,000 bottles. The equipment integrates four independent production procedures into one streamlined system. Live demonstrations covering the full blow-molding and labeling processes will be ongoing throughout the exhibition. According to industry insiders, such highly integrated production systems effectively cut intermediate conveying links, save plant space and reduce preform contamination risks, making them increasingly popular in the global beverage manufacturing sector.

Against the backdrop of beverage manufacturers' rising demands for flexible production, cost optimization and efficiency improvement, intelligent and unmanned production is set to become the mainstream direction for production line transformation and upgrading. Newamstar stated that it will continuously scale up R&D investment, further iterate intelligent manufacturing technologies, and accelerate their large-scale application in diversified industrial scenarios.