CUSTOM LIQUID FILLING - CAPPING - INTEGRATED LINES
Nobody will run 500 units.
Own the machine that will.
Custom-engineered filling and capping machines, built around your container by someone who spent 10 years running a contract bottling floor. Ships crated, plugs into a standard 120-volt outlet, and gets commissioned over video - no electrician, no integrator, no travel line on the invoice.
- Accuracy
- +/-1% of target
- Power
- 120V wall outlet
- Commissioning
- Remote, over video
Why this exists
Co-packers have minimums. Your run is under them.
I ran a contract bottling operation for 10 years. Our minimum was 5,000 units, and I turned away good products every month because the run was too small to schedule - 500 bottles of a ceramic coating, 200 of a new drink, a thousand two-ounce shots for a pilot. Those people didn't have a bottling problem. They had a machine problem, and nobody was building the machine. So that's what I build now. Every unit is engineered around the container you actually use, at the volume you actually run.
Filling machines on load cells with trim pumps for high-accuracy weight filling. Tray-style fillers for fixed or adjustable formats. Conveyor-integrated fillers, single-unit and inline cappers, pick-and-place and rotary capping. Inline metal detection. Inline sensing for temperature, pH, TDS, particle count and viscosity. Every one gets designed around a specific container, product and run size.
The arithmetic
Outsourcing is cheaper once. Owning is cheaper every time after that.
A co-packer charges per unit, every run, forever. A machine is one number. Here is where those two lines cross, using rates SoCal Bottling actually quoted in 2026.
| Your outsourced rate | Cost per 2,000-unit run | Runs to pay off a $3,750 filler |
|---|---|---|
| $0.80 / unit | $1,600 | 2.3 runs |
| $1.50 / unit | $3,000 | 1.3 runs |
| $2.60 / unit | $5,200 | 0.7 runs |
$0.80 and $2.60 are real per-unit rates we quoted in 2026 — the low end a high-volume single-serve job, the high end a ten-flavour short run. Yours will sit somewhere between. $3,750 is the entry bench filler.
What outsourcing also costs
- —Freight to the co-packer and back, every run.
- —Minimums that force you to make more than you can sell.
- —Waiting for a slot in someone else's schedule.
- —No way to run fifty units to test a new flavour.
What you take on instead
- —Your own labour, which is not free.
- —Floor space and somewhere to store components.
- —Consumables, spare parts and cleaning between runs.
- —The learning curve on your first two or three batches.
We would rather you did this maths before you buy than after. If the numbers do not work at your volume, we will tell you.
Remote commissioning
It arrives on a skid and you plug it in.
Every machine ships crated, runs on a standard 120-volt outlet, and arrives pre-configured for your container. Commissioning is a scheduled video call: you uncrate, plug into the wall, connect the tablet to your WiFi, and I drive the interface remotely while we run your product and dial the fill weight against your own scale. Most units are producing the same afternoon they're uncrated. That isn't a compromise. It's why the machine costs what it costs instead of what it costs plus travel, per diem and an integrator's day rate.
How commissioning works →Before you spend anything
Send us your bottle.
Mail us two or three of your actual containers and caps. We'll fit them on the bench, film it running, and send you the video with a quote attached. No charge, no obligation, and you'll know whether your container is going to be a problem before you've committed a dollar.
Start a custom buildWho builds these
I'm the guy who had to make the last machine work at 2am.
SoCal Bottling was a contract bottling operation in Southern California. Ten years of filling other people's products, on equipment that mostly wasn't built for the job, with an operator on the floor and a delivery date that didn't move. I built our own fillers because the ones we could buy were either ten times the volume we needed or wouldn't hold the bottle. The company is in Idaho now and builds the machines instead of running them. Same equipment, same problems, better answers.
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