Bottling Process & Tour

Welcome to our bottling plant! Pictures may not do it justice, so our video tour is coming soon! Our plant is inspected annually by the Maryland Department of Health, NSF International on behalf of the International Bottled Water Association, and the Department of Defense. Our team takes great pride in maintaining a pristine operation – and producing a pristine product.

We start with racks of empty bottles collected by our route managers. When they pick up your bottles at your home or office, they inspect each of them for cleanliness and put them into racks. Once the racks arrive at the bottling line, the bottles are again inspected visually and sniffed for any foreign contaminants. Once a bottle passes these inspections, it is loaded onto the washer conveyor, reading to enter into the production process. 

The next step is to check the bottles for pinhole leaks or cracks. We do that with a specialized piece of equipment – which is called a Leak-Tester (appropriately enough). The Leak Tester pulls a vacuum on each bottle and then monitors if there is any air leaking into the bottle. If not, the bottle passes muster and moves ahead to get filled. If the bottle is leaking, it gets kicked off the line into a hopper to be recycled. Bottles that pass move down the assembly line into the washing process. 

Bottles are then filed into the Bardi Equipment, a complete washing, filling, and capping process in an enclosed clear room environment.

As the bottles enter the Bardi, they go through the washing process – getting washed, sanitized, and rinsed. The machine is controlled by computers and washes every bottle for about two minutes in a 130 degree washing solution. You can see the jets of water hitting the outside of the bottles but the real action is on the inside of the bottles. The jet of water is about 1/2 inch in diameter and just scours the entire inside of the bottle.

The bottles then get rinsed and sanitized with an ozone solution (ozone is about 1500 more powerful than chlorine) and finally, the bottles are rinsed again with finished product water (the good stuff). 

The bottles are then inverted and transferred to our filler – a 1250 bottle per hour, pressurized filling line. Timers and pneumatic valves ensure each bottle is properly filled – all without ever touching a human hand! Everything is done automatically.

The bottles are then automatically capped and date and time stamped, ensuring a perfect product with total traceability. 

Finally, the bottles pass on to the racking area where they are reinserted into the blue racks that get loaded into our trucks every day.

At DrinkMore, we love to talk about how our people make the difference – and they do. You can trust me when I tell you that no one is happier than our people that our Robot handles all the stacking. 5,000 bottles a day is quite the workout!! 

Stay tuned for a future video tour of our production process!