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Yili, China’s leading ice cream manufacturer and an official sponsor of this year’s Olympic Games in Beijing, has developed an Olympic torch of its own in the form of a novelty ice cream.

The Chinese company soon realised that some special efforts would be needed produce these special ice creams and be ready for the arrival of the Olympic torch in Beijing. So Yili turned to Tetra Pak to come up with a solution for high capacity, automated processing.

Produced on a Tetra Hoyer Comet C filling machine, the automated version of the novelty ice cream is a remarkably close match to the original. Thanks to the machine’s servo ice cream doser and rotary device, Yili has achieved the required production capacity and reduced its dependence on manual labour considerably.

The machine is one of four Tetra Hoyer Comet C fillers ordered by Yili in 2007. This year, the company upped its order to nine – overturning an earlier decision to buy five machines from a local competitor at half the price.

The key factors in Yili’s revised decision were the proven stability of the Tetra Hoyer technology, flexibility in product changeovers and the consistent quality of the final products. Despite the higher price, Yili felt that the prospect of an excellent return on investment was sufficient reason to increase their investment budget.

Ruby Fang, ice cream plant sales manager at Tetra Pak China, is highly satisfied with the increased Yili order: “When we first started talking to Yili about this project, they only wanted to buy four filling machines from us,” she said. “We spent a lot of time preparing documents for Yili’s management to illustrate the advantages of our machine. It was also important for us to have the right understanding of industry trends and our customer’s needs. That meant the discussion with the customer was focused upon the values.”