New Plastic Bottle Patents May Take Combo Packs Deep Inside PET Bottles

Variations on a theme:An inventor develops a number of ways to mix a beverage with “extras.”

We’ve all seen convenience items—soda and candy, for instance—taped or glued together on the retail shelf. These are often so sloppily done, and rarely protect the candy properly, that they are usually not enticing packages.

One man saw this problem and dedicated himself to fixing it with simple and complex redesigns of a standard plastic bottle. The first bottle he conceived was a simple bottle design with a flat surface that allowed a snack bar to be placed against the bottle. The perforated label holds the bar in place and allows it to be removed easily.

The man, Don Lindemann, founded his LAPI Company and started studying beverage filling operations. He then designed a process in which the filled bottle would be positioned horizontally via a proprietary positioning method, so that the process would require only minimum modifications to the filler, conveyor lines, and labeler.

The possibilities kept coming

The challenge was to develop additional ways to place a solid object within a plastic beverage container without changing the outside geometry of the bottle. By engineering more ways in which a bottle like this could be formed, Lindemann hoped to create stronger patent. The next set of concepts included a two-liter bottle design with multiple cavities along the outer perimeter of the bottle. This was quickly followed by a design with a cavity created in the bottom of the bottle that extended up into the center of the bottle, big enough to hold a normal-sized snack item easily.

More exotic design ideas include a split, two-part bottle with a cavity in the center. This basic concept could be used to achieve any of the previous designs by splitting the cavity so that one half of the cavity was in each side of the bottle. This concept also allows for a less radical shift from existing blow molding technologies.

The split bottle concept requires a special filler design for the end user. An induction sealed closure (recommended but not necessarily required) as well as the label, play a key role in the split bottle “Combi- Paq” design. Following the first twopart, two-fill bottle concept, a twopart, one-fill bottle was conceived in which only one side of the bottle was filled. The second part of the bottle would simply be a snap-on windowed surface revealing a cavity with a snack or promo item within.

The finer points of bottle forming

It should be understood that PET blow-molded bottles must incorporate design features that will hold its shape with internal pressures of up to 60 PSI when they are filled with carbonated beverages. Hot fill applications, on the other hand, will pull a vacuum of up to 16 lbs. as they cool and the design must have features that keep the bottle from caving in on itself. PET co-extruded beer bottles have some of the most difficult challenges in that they are made up of multiple layers required for the necessary barrier and anti-leaching qualities. Each layer responds differently in the forming process.

While the technologies exist to create a bottle as described above, they are not widely used. Water bottles are the easiest to make and the easiest to fill. Some of the bottle designs the Lindemann developed could be quickly and easily implemented in a water bottle with little risk.

Lindemann’s research indicates the market demand for such a bottle is there and evident in multiple markets. LAPI has developed 17 specifically different ways to place an object within a blow-molded bottle without significantly changing the outside geometry of the bottle. With the design, prototyping, and blow-molding expertise of Helmy Associates (hentaproducts.com) in San Antonio, TX, Lindemann hopes to get the ball rolling with very affordable licensing agreements or proprietary patent-pending forms. (Contact Lindemann at LAPI: dclindem@aol.com.)