Subreddit: r/Entrepreneur
User: u/guyzhi
Original Post:
Plastic bottles from China
I'm looking to source some plastic bottles from China to put my sauces in. Would like to know if anyone has experience with whether they come food safe and cleaned or whether additional cleaning is needed? If so, how do you clean your bottles?
My Response:
Food scientist here.
No, they do not always come food-safe or cleaned. You are likely to have residual contamination in the bottles themselves, like someone mentioned, it's best to use glass because you can retort your sauce in the bottle after hot-filling, which is what you're likely going to need to do for your product to eliminate any contamination.
Plastic is much harder to do this unless you know the specifications and material grade; usually HDPE and PPE will be able to resist retort and hot-fill temperatures without warping, but this also depends on the type of plasticizers found in the bottles themselves.
For decontaminating the bottles, you have a few options. One is to use peracetic acid at a 100 to 200 ppm dilution rate, which is sufficient to kill off any bacteria, molds, and viruses. However, you run the risk of having a vinegar residue. The other option is to use dilute food-grade hydrogen peroxide to rinse the bottles, which is the preferred choice because it will break down into water and oxygen upon heating.
Another option is to retort the bottles themselves, but dry heat requires much higher temperatures to achieve decontamination (121 degrees Celsius under steam pressure for 15 minutes is preferred). You can also apply high-intensity ultraviolet light for 5 minutes, which is sufficient to achieve a 4-log kill step on any surface contaminants, but you run the risk of not being able to achieve decontamination at specific edges or corners that create shadows.
In either case, you will need to heat the bottles to evaporate any of the residual liquid.
Other things to consider are the pH of your sauces and the desired shelf-life stability. Caps also play a role here, as they're usually a different material than the bottles themselves.
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