From sugar deblocking to nutriment precision, beverage manufacturers face unique challenges when scaling production. The industry’s shift toward cleaner labels and functional formulations, as well as potential regulatory changes for food safety standards, all add pressure on management and your ingredient handling systems, especially when dry materials are involved.
Whether you’re manufacturing powdered drink mixes or liquids with solids already dispersed, AZO partners with beverage brands to engineer ingredient systems that are precise, hygienic, and future-ready. We’ve solved ingredient handling issues across numerous production lines for leading beverage manufacturers.
Based on this broad range of experience, here's how to optimize safety, consistency, and compliance at scale.
The #1 Priority In Beverage Manufacturing
Beverage manufacturers are managing increasingly complex recipes and heightened allergen awareness while keeping sustainability top of mind all to meet customer demand. Along with more recent trends like plant-based milks and non-alcoholic options are the familiar staples: energy drinks, electrolyte drinks, powdered protein drinks, coffee, tea, prepared powdered drink mixes, and more.
For ingredient handling, it all boils down to the same primary concern: safety.
The safety of your workers, the final product, and the consumer. Even in liquid-dominant processes, powders like sugar, proteins, acidifiers, or botanical extracts can add significant risk. The risks of combustible dust, hazardous materials, and cross-contamination demand two things:
- The right, high-quality equipment and
- A system-level approach to sanitation and accessibility.
When you address both, better ingredient flow can translate to smoother operations and reduced downtime.
Common Ingredient Handling Issues in Beverage Production
Every beverage production line is different, but risks are common across the board. Here are some familiar material handling issues and how AZO designs to solve them.
1. Combustible Dust Hazards
Powdered ingredients like sugar, cocoa, and flavorings are combustible. Without the right dust collection, grounding, and venting, these materials can become ignition sources. The risks are especially high in older systems, where legacy equipment lacks modern explosion protection.
How AZO helps: AZO delivers NFPA- and ATEX-compliant systems that address these risks head-on, from dust-tight bulk bag unloaders to properly vented pneumatic transfer lines.
2. Hygroscopic Powder Flowability
Ingredient properties like humidity, particle shape, heat sensitivity, and surface texture all impact flow behavior. For example, powders with fat or moisture content, such as cocoa or high-fat milk, can become sticky under stress from heat or friction. Hygroscopic materials like sugar may absorb moisture and begin to clump or block flow.
To prevent issues like clumping, bridging, or flooding, each ingredient must be stored and conveyed within a stable, ideal temperature range based on its Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS). That means minimizing heat exposure and avoiding wide temperature swings to prevent accumulation inside hoppers or piping.
How AZO helps: We perform in-house material testing to match each ingredient with the right conveying technology and flow aids, ensuring smooth transfer, less downtime, and reliable performance.
3. Allergen Control in Multi-SKU Facilities
Nut milk bases, protein isolates, and other allergenic ingredients require strict segregation and rapid changeover protocols. Without clean design and modular equipment, allergen risk can derail compliance. Dedicated allergen lines are often required for ingredient label compliance.
How AZO helps: AZO’s hygienic designs and automated cleaning options support allergen management strategies tailored to your SKUs and standard operating procedures (SOPs).
4. Micro and Minor Ingredient Dosing
Nutriments such as vitamins, acidifiers, and natural flavors demand batch-level accuracy, especially in functional beverages where nutrition panels must be precise. Brands want to see consistent, repeatable results from one batch to the next. And all of the nutriment components need to be accurate because they’re all equally important for a beverage’s functional benefits and flavor.
How AZO helps: AZO’s gravimetric dosing units deliver exact recipe compliance down to the gram, avoiding costly off-spec batches.
5. Cleaning and Changeovers
Frequent product changeovers create bottlenecks and risk cross-contamination. In applications involving allergens, colors, or strong flavor profiles — think switching between vanilla and chocolate in coffee creamer production — the order of operations becomes critical. Facilities must batch from the lightest or least potent variant to the strongest to minimize cleaning complexity and prevent residual carryover.
How AZO helps: Dry ingredient systems require thoughtful engineering to avoid buildup and enable effective cleaning. That’s why our equipment features clamp-on, demountable components for fast disassembly, enabling wash-in-place (WIP) or clean-out-of-place (COP) depending on the application. We angle surfaces for proper drainage and include nozzle connections for WIP systems. For more advanced automation, our partner amixon® supports clean-in-place (CIP) integration, with dedicated fittings for sanitizing once filters, valves, and drains are removed. We make cleaning safer and more efficient by ensuring every system is easy to take apart, move, and maintain.
Case Study: Keeping Sugar and Nutrients Flowing in Energy Drink Production
The Challenge:
An energy drink manufacturer processing over a million pounds of sugar daily faced inconsistent material flow from railcar deliveries. While some loads moved easily, others arrived clumped and compacted, disrupting unloading and slowing production.
The Solution:
We offered solutions for both sugar and nutriment ingredient handling. First, AZO installed lump breakers at the sugar intake to precondition and deblock the material before it entered the silos. Plus, we focused on dehumidifying the silos, stabilizing temperature and humidity.
Further into the facility, smaller-volume nutriment ingredients posed their own set of challenges. Many were hygroscopic and prone to clumping, especially in 2,000-pound bulk bags that would often arrive as a dense, solid mass. AZO supplied a big bag unloading station equipped with hydraulic arms designed to deblock compacted contents into manageable chunks. Once material flowed through the 14" discharge spout, it passed into a lump breaker that reduced it to a flowable state for batching, weighing, and conveying.
The Result:
By pairing mechanical preconditioning with intelligent system design, facility stakeholders experienced fewer delays, less manual labor, and smoother integration across their ingredient handling process. These measures ensured consistent flow into the downstream mixing system and reduced reliance on manual intervention. What once may have required a baseball bat and sheer persistence (Spoiler: this strategy doesn’t work!) is now handled with precision, automation, and safety.
Engineering Smarter Beverage Facilities From the Ground Up
Retrofitting an aging facility or building from the ground up? AZO is able to support every phase of your project. We start with full-system design, including:
- Ingredient behavior testing in our lab to evaluate flow, clumping, explosiveness, and density
- System layout and performance modeling based on your specific batch sizes, ingredient list, and changeover needs
- Coordination with OEMs and integrators to ensure seamless integration into upstream and downstream processes
- Support through start-up and scale-up, including on-site training and SAT (site acceptance testing)
Because beverage facilities often require both liquid and dry ingredient systems, AZO’s cross-functional expertise offers you an edge. We understand how powdered flavors interact with liquid concentrates and how to design systems that bridge the two.
Why Beverage Manufacturers Trust AZO
Whether your plant is handling dry powder mixes for consumer use or dry solids dispersed in liquids, the solution must extend beyond hygienic equipment design. AZO systems are engineered for demountability and cleaning access, but just as important is how that equipment is installed. Strategic placement in clean, accessible zones enables easier maintenance and faster changeovers.
From pneumatic conveying to dust-tight bulk bag unloaders, AZO ensures that every component — not just the shiny exterior — is aligned with safety, cleanliness, and production flow.
We offer:
- Lab-tested flow guarantees
- TEX/NFPA-compliant systems with explosion protection
- Hygienic designs that support allergen segregation
- Gravimetric dosing for batch-level precision
- Modular, scalable system designs for growing beverage portfolios
Contact us and let’s design a better beverage system that performs from day one.