Precision fluid metering
17 July 2026 
H&P looks at how precision fluid metering technology is helping food and beverage manufacturers improve product consistency, reduce waste and enhance production efficiency through highly accurate, pulseless ingredient dosing.
For most food and beverage manufacturers, particularly in high volume markets, repeatedly delivering identical products is essential for maintaining consumer experience and brand reputation. The way in which liquid ingredients are delivered into a food and beverage processing line fundamentally impacts standardisation and repeatability in the end product, and fluid metering pumps have a vital role to play.
One company helping food and beverage manufacturers improve product consistency through precision fluid metering is Slack & Parr. Working with manufacturers across sectors ranging from chocolate and confectionery to spreads and desserts, the company developed its Pulseless Flow range of high-precision, food-safe gear metering pumps to give manufacturers greater control over a wide range of different viscosity fluids. The range offers a specialist alternative to standard industrial pumps, such as reciprocating, peristaltic and diaphragm pumps, which are commonly used in food and beverage processing but are not designed to deliver the same levels of precision as gear pumps.
Flow technology
Slack & Parr’s Pulseless Flow technology is engineered to overcome the potential for product inconsistencies caused by small variations in the rate and volume of liquid flowing through the pump and into the manufacturing process. The technology eliminates pulsation in the flow, which can lead to modest but notable variations in recipe ratios or differences in the way the product looks and is typically linked to increased wastage. The pumps are built from finely engineered, food-safe stainless steels and designed to deliver an extremely high level of dimensional stability, strength, durability and precision. They are built around hardened steel involute gears which are machined to precise tolerances of one or two microns, resulting in extremely small clearances – measuring significantly less than a human hair – between the gear and mating components and ensuring almost no internal slip even at high pressures.
Alongside standard single-outlet designs, the range also includes custom-designed, multiple-outlet gear pumps which are ideally suited to a wide variety of food and drink applications and offer considerable cost and efficiency benefits. Multiple outlet or planetary gear pumps have been commonplace for many years in other specialised industries, such as manmade fibres, and their popularity is now growing in food and beverage manufacturing. Planetary pumps provide multiple, identical fluid outlets from a single piece of equipment. Crucially, they only need one drive system to power them, so not only do they enhance processing efficiency and consistency, but they can also lead to significant machinery cost and space savings.
Planetary pump technology
The operational and business benefits of using planetary pump technology have recently been shown in Slack & Parr’s work with a leading manufacturer of natural, fruit-based confectionary
products. When they began working together, the manufacturer was using a machine producing 32 streams of product from 32 individual metering heads. This approach was creating recurrent
drive and control problems as well as product inconsistencies and quality issues. Slack & Parr supplied the company with four eight-outlet planetary pumps combined with a custom-designed
manifold system to distribute all 32 of the pumps’ outlet flows and deliver them all in one straight line, which was required for the next part of the process. Immediately, product variation
dropped from around 40% across all 32 streams to +/- 1%. Since that first installation, the company has now converted all its production lines to Slack & Parr’s planetary gear pumps with
the installation of 24 more pumps.
For further information please visit: www.slackandparr.com