Tired of struggling to find a way to easily fill your hot sauce bottles at home? This guide will show you four different methods of how to simply and easily fill your jars with your preferred condiment.
Through over 10 years of research we've boiled down the data to just three methods that work wonderfully. Please note, your solution will vary with your working environment and may not work for everything.
Pitcher and Funnel Method
This is by far the most well known method of filling hot sauce bottles. All it requires is a simple funnel placed into the neck of the hot sauce jar and slowly filled with a pitcher of sauce/salsa.
Pros:
- Cheap
- Simple with no moving parts
- Works well for thick sauces.
- Great for small batches
Cons:
- May get very messy
- Slow
- Product cools down quickly
Direct from Pot w/ Spigot
The method we currently use is to use a brew kettle with an integrated spigot and is a happy medium between the pitcher method and the piston filler method which we will discuss next.
The sauce is cooked in the kettle and then directly filled via the attached spigot.
This method makes filling hot sauce and salsa jars extremely easy. All you need is a brew kettle and a matching spigot. Please note, your spigot should be made out of 304 stainless steel.
Pros:
- Inexpensive
- Speed
- Ease of use
- Virtually mess free
Cons:
- Slower with thick sauces
- More parts to wash and assemble
- Not as accurate as a piston filler
Manual Piston Filler
Another way to fill your sauce bottles is to use a manual piston filler. These work by using two one-way valves to first pull sauce directly from the pot into the piston and then by ejecting it out of the nozzle and into the bottle.
This works absolutely amazing for producing small bottles of sauce as you can accurately control the stroke length of the piston and thus the fill volume.
Pros:
- Accuracy
- Speed
Cons:
- Some designs are very complex
- Labor intensive as internal rings heat up
- Can get expensive
Pneumatic Piston Filler
If you are a growing hot sauce company, this is probably where you'll end up. A pneumatic piston filler is extremely fast and accurate. Some of them even have heated sauce hoppers to keep your sauce at temperature if doing a huge run.
If you're looking for the Cadillac of hot sauce filling options, this is for you. However, be prepared for sticker shock as some of these can hit $5,000 dollars not including the air compressor needed to run one of these.
Pros:
- Extremely fast, perfect for high volume production
- Can be converted to automatic filling via sensors
- Very accurate, can get within 1% tolerance
Cons:
- Very expensive
- Complex designs means more points of failure and more parts to wash
- Requires additional equipment to operate
As you can see, there is a filling solution for almost ANY bottling setup you may employ. Use these methods to easily fill your sauce bottles. There are several other options you can use such as a turkey baster or even a large food safe syringe!
