Pouch Fitment and Inserting

Most companies that do pouch fitment inserting only have a few styles that they insert due to the tooling costs and set-up expenses.

At HQC, we invested in both manual and automatic fitment inserters, to set us apart from our competitors. There tends to be limited capacity as well as very few companies in the US that do fitment inserting. The ones that do offer weld spout inserting are mostly limited to common fitments, and may only have the tooling to do a few different styles. At HQC, we offer 13 different styles and configurations of fitments to be inserted.

As we began to expand this portion of HQC, we learned that our customers wanted our fitments, but couldn’t find companies to do the pouch fitment inserting at the level of quality we had. We knew that we couldn’t just stop at developing weld spouts and custom pouch fitments, we wanted the ability to run samples, as well as preproduction runs in order to validate and determine quality criteria.

HQC has experience which has helped us to set quality standards and testing processes that allow us to watch and correct any issues that may arise while we are inserting. Because fitment inserting is limited as far as testing goes, there are no established industry standards for spouted pouches. As a result, companies develop standards based on failure limits which can be misleading. Over the years, HQC has been able to accumulate knowledge through the many pouches we have inserted. We now have standards based on processes that were optimized for weld spout inserting and custom pouch fitments. This helped us to create a quality process that highlights if a fitment inserting process is starting to deviate and if changes need to be made.

We know that things like temperature, dwell time and getting pressures right all can have a huge impact on fitment quality. We know that all film and sealant layers are not the same and can vary from run to run. Being able to see this through testing spouted pouches while inserting helps us to maintain consistency. We also utilize our inserting machine to compare sealant films, fitment materials and seal bar design to make continual improvements and ultimately reach higher standards.