RO Plants & Water Treatment for Food and Beverage Factories

Sizing for a bottling line, not for a building

The most common sizing mistake in beverage plants is quoting against nominal line speed. Real consumption includes rinse water, CIP cycles, the RO reject stream and line losses — and those can add a substantial fraction to what the membranes actually have to produce. Size against measured consumption across a normal production week, then divide by the hours the plant will genuinely run.

We generally size beverage plants for 16 to 20 hours of operation rather than 24. That is not conservatism; it is what leaves a window for membrane flushing and CIP without stopping the filling line. A plant sized for 24 hours has no maintenance window at all.

Recovery rate matters as much as capacity. At 50% recovery a 10,000 LPH product stream needs 20,000 LPH of feed — which the borewell may not deliver in summer.

Remineralisation: why pure water is not the goal

RO permeate is close to pure, and pure water tastes flat. For packaged drinking water, IS 14543 sets limits rather than requiring maximum purity, and a controlled mineral dose is what gives the product its characteristic taste. This is the step that separates a water plant from a beverage plant: blending a measured fraction of treated feed back into the permeate, or dosing minerals to a defined recipe, so that every batch matches the last one.

The same logic applies in dairy and food processing, where water hardness affects everything from equipment scaling to the behaviour of the product itself. Softening ahead of the process is usually about protecting the plant; RO is about controlling the ingredient.

A complete packaged drinking water line

1. Raw water storage, multigrade sand filtration and activated carbon filtration.
2. Water softening or antiscalant dosing to protect the RO membranes.
3. Micron cartridge filtration.
4. Reverse osmosis sized on measured demand and feed TDS.
5. Mineral dosing or controlled blending to the product recipe.
6. Ozonation to a controlled residual at the storage tank, with UV sterilisation before filling.
7. Automatic rinsing, filling and capping matched to the line speed.

Ozonation and the residual that matters

Ozone is the disinfection route of choice in packaged drinking water because it is powerful, it leaves no chemical residue, and it decays back to oxygen. The operational detail that decides whether it works is residual at the point of filling — enough to protect the bottle through its shelf life, not so much that the product carries an odour when opened. A residual in the region of 0.2 to 0.4 ppm at filling is the range most plants work to.

We supply the ozone generators, contact systems and UV units as part of the line rather than as bought-in components, which means the disinfection stage is sized against your actual tank volume and turnover rather than fitted afterwards.

Turnkey or staged

For a new facility we supply the complete mineral water project — treatment, storage, ozonation and bottling — as a single scope, which avoids the interface problems that come from splitting a line across suppliers. For an existing plant, we more often add capacity or replace a stage. Either way, send us your feed water analysis, target output in litres per hour, bottle formats and line speed, and we will quote against the line rather than against a catalogue.