Congo-10000BPH Carbonated Drink Line

In late summer of 2019, I was in the workshop fine-tuning a newly arrived 6,000-bottle fully automatic blow-molding machine when my phone suddenly rang. It was Vincent calling from overseas. The background on his end was noisy, filled with voices and the hum of an air compressor, but his excitement came through loud and clear: “Guess which row I just counted to in the warehouse? That 5,000-bottle line you bought last year is now running day and night—and still can’t keep up with the water trucks.”

After I hung up, I couldn’t help but smile, remembering how he had first walked into our factory back in 2018. At that time, it was only my third year in the industry, and I sat upright in the reception room clutching the freshly revised production line plan. Dressed in a faded work jacket, he pointed at the base of a sample bottle and asked, “If we adjust this curve by half a millimeter, how much material could we save?” Later I learned that the small local water plant he owned had just survived its toughest days. He had stretched his budget to secure that 5,000-bottle line—even as unsold bottled water piled up in the warehouse corner, and a hand-drawn factory expansion blueprint hung on his office wall.

By spring 2020, at the height of the pandemic, his messages carried a pioneer’s determination. In one video, he stood on a freshly leveled lot, the blow-molding machine we had delivered the year before humming faintly in the background. “The bottled water shelves here are always empty,” he said. “So I bought the factory next door. I need a line that can produce 15,000 bottles—three times faster than the last one. Can you do it?” As I stared at his mud-stained leather shoes on the screen, I suddenly recalled his very first visit, when he quietly ran his hands over the machines in our workshop and whispered, “When we scale up, I want something like this.”

I saw him again in March 2024 at the Gulf Food Expo. This time he wore a sharp suit and was flanked by two Indian engineers. Passing our booth, he patted my shoulder and exclaimed, “Carbonated drinks are taking off! Get me a 10,000-bottle production line.” Under the exhibition lights, I noticed the fine lines that had appeared around his eyes—but when he smiled, he looked exactly like the man from 2018, clutching an order and asking, “Can you ship quickly?”

Now in 2025, Vincent and I remain friends, pushing forward side by side in our own fields, continuing the journey we began years ago.