Food & Beverage
The bottling industry always has a large demand for purified water. There are tens of thousands of beverage industries around the world producing billions of gallons of soft drinks every day. Each and every one has slightly different requirements on what purity of water they are looking for, and Loop Water is always willing to customize a water treatment solutions to meet your standards.
BOTTLING PURIFICATION PROCESS
Beverage bottling usually starts with municipal tap water, coming right out of the water sources from the cities where the plant resides. Tap water like this is certainly drinkable, but usually has an element of hardness, or deposits of heavy metals (usually from the pipes that transport the water) that detract from the taste. Water softening and reverse osmosis are perfect for creating pure, potable water.
Once a beverage company has a large sample of purified water, a “blank slate”, if you will, to work with, they typically begin adding their own unique mixtures of minerals, metals, carbon dioxide (the “fizz” in soda), sugars, syrups, and food coloring to create the soft drinks that we know and love. Once this solution is thoroughly mixed, it is packed into sealed bottles or cans and transported to its destination. Alcoholic beverages go through a similar process, but typically baked with yeast and some form of grain or fruit added to them to produce alcohol. Because of the simplicity of the premise of beverage bottling, a majority of companies that make beverages do it in small businesses.
Tap Water Vs. Bottled Water:
Contrary to popular belief, “mountain fresh” or “spring” water also come from the same sources as the tap water in your sink. Why does it taste so much better than tap water, you may ask? Bottled water, believe it or not, goes through the same process as any soft drink. The municipal tap water is purified (ideally with a reverse osmosis system, softener, or sterilizer), making a “blank slate” for the company to work with, and then rather than adding syrups and sugars, bottled water goes through a bit of a different process.
The Best Tasting Water:
Companies that make bottled water send environmental experts out to regions where the water tastes better than our tap, like mountain waterfalls, freshwater lakes, and clear rivers as examples. The experts take small samples of the water in these areas and meticulously test and calculate the mineral and metal contents of this water, creating a recipe of sorts to replicate the taste. Then, once they have instructions on how much of what minerals and metals to add, the process becomes just like any other soft drink, dissolving these substances in the water and then bottling them for shipping.