Stainless Steel Tubing for Food & Beverage Industries

An enormous market segment, nearly everyone has interaction with the food and beverage industry daily as a consumer. At Vita, we’re producing parts every day that help food and beverage companies deliver their products to their customers. Some of the components we build go into applications including coffee maker temperature probes, digital food temperature probes and stainless steel tubing assemblies for liquid transfer.

Years ago, Vita Needle worked with a Hawaiian food company to manufacture an injection needle that would be efficient for their application. With a wide variety of gauges, point styles, lengths and connection types, we offer custom reusable needle assemblies that serve a wide variety of uses; in the food & beverage industry, our needles are used for everything from dispensing product into packaging, to injecting sauces, to sampling liquids, and everything in between. This particular application required that the needle have a threaded 1/8 NPT hub to connect to the customers’ existing equipment, a 14 gauge cannula to be able to properly dispense the consistency of their mixture without clogging and also avoiding creating an unnecessarily large penetration hole, a point that could penetrate a soft tissue without coring it, a 4½” long out of hub cannula to penetrate to the proper depth, and side ports that were as large as possible for rapid dispensing. Vita Needle quoted and manufactured their needle assembly based on their provided specifications and offered our standard VN401 hub, 14RW (regular wall) gauge cannula, and a machine swaged pencil point with side holes slightly smaller than the ID of the tube for optimal dispensing and strength. 

The standard material for many food and beverage applications is 304 or 316 stainless steel tubing because of it’s relatively low cost and long proven characteristics of corrosion resistance and ease of cleaning. This tubing can be supplied in stock or custom sizes, and we do manufacture other alloys as well. Vita can produce anything from simple tube cutoffs to sophisticated products with complex geometries and features.  Some of our most frequently utilized capabilities include EDM, CNC turning/milling, EC cutoff and grinding and welding along with many other capabilities and our own proprietary technologies.