ATD (Agio Technical Department) is one of the big suppliers in the cigar industry.

ATD is an innovative builder and designer of machines and production lines for handling and packing of a variety of products.

ATD has placed a new flavor injector machine, which can process 1,250 cigars per minute, instead of the traditional casing process.

An aroma is introduced with the help of an injector needle into individual rolled cigars utilizing the so-called “walking beam” principle – a slide with 22 needles and valves runs along with the cigar transport chain to fill the cigars on the chain with the required flavor.

The machine has several safeties such as cigar and needle break identification to prevent the machine from being polluted and aroma from being wasted. From the 24-litre aroma tank, the flavor is supplied to the valves by a pressurized mechanism. The tank is put on a high-precision digital scale to monitor the aroma consumption.

The cigars are supplied from a magazine with a tilting mechanism for cigar trays or from a manually filled magazine. The great advantage of this aroma injection method is that it can be made before the cigars are packed. This reduces the amount of flavored waste tobacco and it has the advantage of the cigar trays and trolleys etc. not smelling of odor.

ATD’s Wim Heeren explains why the injector has several benefits: “Not so much flavor is needed, which will save money for any manufacturer. Any waste in the making process before the injector can be reused in the filler. And the flavors will never be contaminated.”

Also there are some more advantages: the flavor injector machinery needs no cleaning (except for the actual injector), the possibility to change aromas quickly (can be done in under an hour) and the flexibility to run small batches for trial runs, limited runs, small orders, etc.