Introduction

Making of drip bags for overseas consumption has been tedious and time consuming as it is a completely manual work and high amounts of effort is required to make enough drip-bags for the consumption of just one person. Commercially, coffee drip-bags are highly costly due to the fact that it is labour intensive and time consuming. The drip bags cannot be pre-made due to the low shelf life of specialty beans, and most drip-bags are made-to-order.  As such, this project aims to reduce the intensity of labour as well as time taken to make multiple drip-bags to allow for a more streamlined process that benefits both consumers and producers.

Problem

As of now, the making of a single drip bag takes about 2-3 minutes and making of one persons worth of drip bag for a 10 day trip can easily take up to 30 minutes. It is therefore difficult to make drip bags for large groups of coffee enjoyers and too expensive to purchase from stores. The most tedious part of the production is the weighing and grinding of beans, where each bag of beans needs to be individually weighed and manually ground (for consumers without an electric grinder), which takes up a large amount of time. the drip bags then need to be individually sealed, packaged and sealed again which incur highly intensive labour.

Proposed Solution

To alleviate the issue of time and labour, our group aims to automate the grinding and dispensing of beans as well as the sealing of drip bags. This allows for the most labour intensive part of the production to be replaced by machines to allow for more bags to be produced with the same amount of time while needing less manpower for the job. This potentially enables consumers to easily produce their own drip-bags in large amounts and allow for shop owners to reduce the cost of production and opportunity cost for producing a single drip-bag, ultimately reducing the cost of drip-bags in the market.

Limitations

    1. The complete automation is impossible to achieve in our scale as a very precise robotic system is required to mount the drip-bags onto the grinder outlet hence only a semi-automation is possible
    2. Grinder is limited to discrete mass per serving hence there will be no continuous adjustments to mass dispensed
    3. Machine takes up too much space and not practical for house use

Vision

We aim to reduce the intensity of labour to make drip bags by automating the parts that are labour intensive.

We aim to reduce the time taken from 3 minutes per drip bag to 3 drip-bags per minute.