The smart, dispensing ViCAP changes everything
Notice anything odd in the above image? Look closely, and the telltale signs are there—the bottle cap’s convenient integrated drinking spout, the bright red ‘plunger’, and the distinctive ridges of the body.
This is not just your regular, run of the mill bottle cap. It’s a smart, dispensing cap that features a container within that can be filled with both powdered and liquid goodies. Press the red button on top and the contents are emptied into the beverage below. Press. Shake. Drink.
Developed by Switzerland-based ViCAP Systems, this closure is not just for show—it adds unique functionality that conventional drinks with standard caps can never match.
🇧🇬 AMATA x 🇨🇭ViCAP
If you’re coming from the home page, you might have noticed that this is the exact same image featured at the top of the site. The reason is simple:
We believe it’s a testament to our capability and flexibility as a manufacturer.
No matter how complex to manufacture standard drinks can be, they can never be more challenging to mass-produce than a beverage with a ViCAP simply because it adds extra steps to the mix—from injection-molding the four ViCAP components, through automatically assembling it via a robot, to filling it with either powder or liquid.
Extra steps invariably mean additional points of possible failure in the production process, and that’s true enough. So at all stages, QA has to be tight. And while it took us a while to get the hang of it, we did get there eventually.
I learned about smart, dispensing closures like the ViCAP back in 2016, and dedicated a significant portion of the year researching them. There were a few. About four other competing designs did end up at my desk to check out, but this Swiss innovation won me over due to several, very practical in nature, factors.
What's so impressive about the ViCAP?
Tasteful, intricate design is a guilty pleasure of mine. I enjoy beautifully designed products, even if they’re just mockups, irrespective of their oftentimes obvious functional flaws. If it’s pretty and it triggers an emotional response, I’m there for it.
But as a Product Manager at a firm that’s involved in the mass-production of physical goods, such designs are, more often than not, an impossibility in practice. They’re showcases; beautiful playthings. Not practical technologies fit for mass production or adoption. But, at the same time, totally utilitarian designs are often… well, ugly and rough.
Great design fuses function with form. Which is why we ended up picking the ViCAP and joining force with ViCAP Systems.
Unlike competing concepts, the ViCAP is thoughtfully engineered to be both visually appealing and functionally sound. Instead of gigantic, unwieldy rival creations, it is not an eye-sore (no, really, some competing designs are comical in person), all the while retaining the properties that make for a workable innovation in the context of mass manufactory. That’s a tall order, but the engineering there is that good.
Benefits of using the smart, dispensing ViCAP
- Temperature shielding
Some drinks are filled at high temperatures to ensure shelf stability. Heat is detrimental to some functional ingredients. And even when hot-filling isn’t the case, all drinks are palletized and transported via mostly unrefrigerated trucks and near-universally stored in unrefrigerated distributor warehouses. And sometimes, even inside the store, there isn’t enough space for them to be cooled.
This is problematic, as a decent portion of the aforementioned categories of functional ingredients experience an even more significant efficacy decay when inside a liquid, as temperature increases. To put it simply: they’re already struggling to remain active in a liquid solution and adding temperature just makes things even worse.
- Effect of liquid pH
Depending on the mix of functional ingredients used to fortify healthy soft drinks, their pH requirements can differ between each other. So a situation occurs where Functional Ingredient #1 retains its physiological activity better at pH levels of 4.5, while Functional Ingredient #2 prefers an even lower pH.
As you can imagine, the drink is the drink—it has a specific pH that is ideally stable, so it cannot accommodate multiple different ideal pH levels. This problem can be eliminated by the ViCAP if the functional ingredients are powdered, as they’re kept outside of the reach of the drink liquid in the bottle below.
- UV light protection
Another noteworthy advantage of storing your functional ingredients inside the ViCAP is its designed ability to shield them from UV light.
Yes, in a perfect world, all drinks would be protected by direct UV light, but the reality of things is that it is not. Go to your nearest logistics center and observe if you don’t believe me—you’ll notice that while good operators endeavor to avoid leaving goods outside their warehousing, it’s near impossible to guarantee perfect coverage from manufacturer > distributor > retail.
UV light damages the functional ingredients in your drink.
- Wow effect
Yes, delighting your customers with a different, satisfying experience is not a directly measurable benefit in the way that efficacy decay of functional ingredients in liquids is, but it does offer an advantage.
There are millions of different drinks on the market. By shape, size, content, they very rarely differ much from each other, making it incredibly difficult for product owners to differentiate their offering. The ViCAP alone won’t help you grab everyone’s attention, but it will certainly help.
The above is confirmed in our experience. People that try a ViCAP product for the first time are intrigued by its ability to dispense functional ingredients and color into the main drink below. This real-time colorization is attractive and helps delight buyers.
We feel strongly about full disclosures
That is why, despite AMATA having a vested interest in the ViCAP, I won’t sugar-coat things: there are some cons to the ViCAP.
As a family-owned manufacturing company, we strongly believe in our duty to fully inform our private label customers of the various drawbacks of every technology and process that we have experience with.
First and foremost on the list of cons, the ViCAP is a specialty, patented product. Unlike regular caps, it’s made out of four components, each of which has to be precision injection-molded separately and then assembled together. This means that the ViCAP is more expensive than a standard cap and the decision of whether the added cost makes sense is yours alone to take. We can only advise.
Second, the ViCAP requires the use of a sleeve type label or another method of securing the cap to the bottle in order to ensure that your product is pilfer-proof. While sleeve type labels are absolutely the best possible way to label your product in my opinion, they do typically cost more than wrap-around or other styles of labels. This is only fair, as the material they’re made out of has to be shrinkable, and the size of the label is obviously much larger.
Lastly, if you’re looking to capture the full benefit of the ViCAP, you’d require your functional ingredients in powdered form. This is typically a non-issue. However, certain ingredients are typically available in liquid form and their powder counterpart can be a bit more challenging to source. By that, I mean in terms of general availability and sometimes inferior in-stock levels, requiring a custom production run. Not always, but sometimes that entails an MOQ (Minimum Order Quantity), which may or may not be comparable if you were to go after a liquid-filled ViCAP.
If you’ve gotten this far, congrats on your attention-span, that’s impressive! Hopefully this basic introduction into packaging choices has been of use.
Now that you’ve got the fundamentals covered, perhaps it’s time to shoot us a message? Whether it’s Text, Viber, WhatsApp, E-mail or a call, that’s fine—feel free to pick the least personally existential dread-y way to get in touch and we’ll oblige.