Downtime in oral pouch production: 5 common causes
What are the root causes of downtime in your oral pouch manufacturing plant? Rather than major breakdowns, it’s the accumulated effect of inefficient processes and small, recurring issues on your plant floor. Which of these bottlenecks do you recognize from your production environment – and what are they costing you?
Oral pouch production comes with a unique set of challenges. High-speed output, frequent flavor changes, sensitive materials, and strict HSEQ requirements leave little room for error. Stoppages and downtime are rarely caused by one single failure. Instead, it’s the result of recurring, everyday issues that gradually eat into your available production time.
Below, we list five common culprits, based on extensive experience from working closely with oral pouch manufacturers. Which of them are slowing down your production?
1. Manual material handling and human error
Does your plant rely on operators manually moving material between workstations – climbing ladders, carrying bags, and pushing carts around the production area? If you’re manufacturing pouches on a small scale, with just a handful of workers, this setup might be sufficient for your current needs. But as volume and complexity increases, so does the risk of stoppages caused by inefficient processes – and human error:
- Material arriving late at the filling machine
- Wrong material or flavor being fed into a hopper
- Carts or containers used in the wrong order between batches
The consequences (and costs) of these delays or mistakes quickly add up. You’ll frequently need to stop the line to investigate quality and contamination issues, re-clean equipment, or fix material flows. In some cases, entire batches have to be scrapped.
2. Inefficient cleaning and changeovers
How long does a typical cleaning cycle take, for example between flavor changes, in your plant today?
If you’re using mechanical systems, such as screw conveyors or bucket elevators, the process probably involves multiple steps: disassembling components, moving them to separate wash areas, cleaning and drying them, and finally putting them all back together. Even if everything goes according to plan, this eats up a lot of uptime. And if residues remain or parts are reassembled incorrectly, what started as a routine changeover can quickly turn into hours of lost productivity.
According to Melvin Zetterberg, Senior Technical Advisor at Piab, inefficient cleaning is often a ‘downtime blind spot’ for oral pouch producers:
“You might not see your cleaning cycle as a downtime issue because you’re not aware of how fast it could be. I’ve visited facilities where cleaning takes hours, and others where it takes as little as 30 minutes. Of course, every plant is different. But in my experience, vacuum conveying solutions tend to require significantly less cleaning time than mechanical setups.”
3. Maintenance issues and long recovery times
Preventing stoppages from happening in the first place is great. But when they do occur, every minute of recovery time matters. If you need to wait days, or weeks, for service technicians or spare parts, even a simple issue will have costly consequences, with production reverting to manual handling (if running at all).
These problems are more common in facilities relying on mechanical conveying systems, as David Gabrielsson, Technical Specialist at Piab, explains:
"There are more moving parts, which increases the risks. Both directly, as something might come loose and end up in your product, and indirectly, because of slow delivery times for spare parts."
4. Dust emissions and leakages
In oral pouch production, dust emissions aren’t just a health hazard. They also impact your downtime by increasing cleaning needs and triggering unplanned stops to restore acceptable working conditions.
“For example, if you’re transporting material with air-blown conveying, even a minor leakage will quickly spread dust around the whole room. These stoppages are less of a problem in facilities using closed systems,” David Gabrielsson explains.
5. Inconsistent material behavior
Powders don’t always behave the same way from one week to the next. When humidity or bulk density changes, it also affects how the material flows through your conveying system. Production risks being halted by blockages or overflows. And the more manual steps required to adjust the settings of your line equipment to accommodate shifts in material behavior, the more downtime you’ll get.
Want to discuss challenges and solutions with an expert?
At Piab, we have a proven track record of setting up efficient and hygienic conveying solutions for oral pouch manufacturers. If you have any questions – from how to reduce downtime, dust exposure, or cross-contamination to efficiently scaling up production – don’t hesitate to contact us. Our engineers are happy to offer their advice.
Register for our upcoming webinar to simplify your production lines and scale your business.
Join Piab's upcoming webinar on February 26th at 2pm EST to discuss how manufacturers can maintain ingredient purity, batch consistency, and ensure a homogenous material blend. Save your free seat today.
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