Making Sure You’re Hydrated – One Sip at a Time
Making sure that people are hydrated by drinking enough water daily has become a mission for one man. And with the collaborative contributions of R&D/Leverage UK, ISBM total Solution provider, and PET Power, a plastic bottle producer in the Netherlands, Fred Housheer is making his entrepreneurial dream a reality. The result of these efforts is the Hydranome, www.hydranome.com, a specialty water bottle that lets the user know how much water they drink daily and whether it’s enough with the use of an intuitive interactive dial on the cap. The dial helps the consumer track the number of times the bottle has been filled and the dots on the lid show the adequate daily intake as well as the progress of the user to meet this intake.
“I started this initiative about a year ago,” says Housheer, who has had a career in marketing and business management for global OEMs including Philips NV, a Dutch technology company, and Norelco. “I began to think it was time for me to start my own company, and began looking into the value space of hydration, mainly how much water people are supposed to drink daily.”
Housheer noticed a trend in that over the past six to seven years there was a huge increase in the amount of sugar-sweetened beverages people consume while reducing their water intake. “I approached my former design team about designing a water bottle with a counter to track how much water people are drinking as well as indicating the daily requirements,” Housheer explains. “My wife and I invested our savings in design and engineering, then the search for production firms and toolmakers started. I first found PET Power who has production facilities in the Netherlands, and they helped me to think about the plastic material – what material we could use for the bottle. They also recommended R&D/Leverage in the UK because they’ve done many projects with them. By coincidence, I had already looked for tooling companies to produce the bottles and found R&D/Leverage as a potential partner. By coincidence they were doing work for PET Power.”
Steve Gough, the technical manager for R&D/Leverage, managed the project. “We were contacted by PET Power, inquiring as to our interest in working on this project called Hydranome that involved moulding a bottle from Eastman’s Tritan™ copolyester material,” explains Gough. “We’ve done many projects with Tritan™, a resin developed for reusable water bottles. We’re the market leaders in handling that resin and PET Power also has great knowledge how to run Tritan™, they also have suitable machines for moulding that material and were a great choice.”
The resin has some unique properties that make it ideal for drinking-water bottles, but it can also be difficult to work with, including the fact that it doesn’t like to be stretched. “It’s an interesting resin to work with. It’s got good characteristics such as it is reusable, dishwasher safe, very close to the feel and clarity of glass and BPA free, so it’s ideal for baby bottles and drinking-water bottles, which is where our focus was for this project – drinking-water bottles,” Gough explains. “However we needed that to obtain optimum quality with no blemishes in the crystal clear bottle, so the preform had to be designed to mimic the actual bottle. PET Power also has machines needed to mould the bottle under ideal conditions.”
One of the challenges R&D/Leverage encountered was the neck diameter (was) smaller than R&D typically likes in relation to the body diameter. “We put some designs together to reduce the stretch ratios and to keep the stretch to a minimum, which would help to keep the clarity good over the whole length of the bottle,” states Gough. “We did a lot of work on the design then contacted Hydranome to see what the variables were we could work with. They wanted a neck design to accommodate a comfortable drinking position, as well as a heavy weight bottle. That required a really good thick, long preform to provide the weight required for a reusable bottle and achieve the quality. It took quite a bit of collaboration to come up with an optimized preform for this product.”
Other challenges involved an engraving, date and logo on the bottle. “All of these intricate features can be quite challenging with this resin but ultimately we were able to get the quality we needed,” says Gough. “These aren’t the cheapest containers so the quality is very important and everything we did allowed us to optimize the design and give them a top-quality product.”
R&D/Leverage has the right machine, experience with the resin, the ability to be versatile and flexible with design, along with the collaboration with PET Power and Hydranome made the project successful. “There are lots of bottles in the market but Hydranome has better transparency, and higher quality,” says Gough. “We worked with PET Power to optimize the cavitation of their machine – optimize throughput with the optimum molding processing parameters to prevent flow lines and eliminate that sensitivity of the material.”
The Hydranome is injection stretch blow moulded with single stage tooling, with the preform and bottle on one machine to get optimum results. The tooling was tested in R&D/Leverage’s Product Solutions Laboratory in the UK then transferred to Holland. PET Power understood how R&D/Leverage developed the tooling and the moulding process. All PET Power had to do was modify their machine to accommodate the resin – make it more suitable for Tritan™.
“For me, startup was a big thing,” Housheer says. “It was a joy to see the professional way the R&D/Leverage team was working on the mould. They ran a few cycles to see the end result and were extremely helpful in showing us what needed to be done to get the best process settings for the optimum product. They were very supportive of me as an entrepreneur. I might be a small customer for them but it made no difference in the attention they gave to Hydranome to get a successful outcome. I was pleased with the whole operation. R&D/Leverage produced the first batch of bottles so I could start selling them right away from our living room.”
The tooling was completed last September and installed in one of PET Power’s production facilities. Hydranome is selling quite well, and Housheer has a warehouse to hold the first production run of bottles that was recently produced. “We’ll no longer be doing this from our living room,” Housheer states. “We’ve sold a substantial part and we’re getting more traction. The design of the bottle is appreciated and the functionality of showing how much water one is drinking is accepted by the consumer. We were at a health fair recently and got very positive results from consumers there who were amazed that the bottle looks like glass. They were impressed.”
Housheer concludes: “It was a smooth operation and a great collaboration to make sure the end result was a success.”
Photo: R&D/Leverage
