Why are Lipton Iced Tea cans soft sometimes?

[Apple Leisure]

And do you guys still vend them?  It's not unusual to find cans that feel weak structurally and are misshapen.  I worry they will break in the machine and/or the customer will not be satisfied.

 

Goes for Hawaiian Punch cans too, but I currently am not selling those.

[AngryChris]

They are not carbonated so there is practically zero pressure inside, unlike carbonated soda.

[Southeast Treats]

I vend fuze tea cans and have no problems generally, I do watch for really bad cans when loading the machine.  Water bottles are the bigger problem; same issue, no carbonation...

[Apple Leisure]

They are not carbonated so there is practically zero pressure inside, unlike carbonated soda.

 

 

Yeah, but most of them are perfectly fine and solid.  It's just the occasional can that feels 'not quite right', and the ever rarer one that seems like it might fall apart in your hands.

[AZVendor]

You just have to keep your eye open for the occasional squishy can so ti doesn't get into your machine.  They charge the un-carbonated cans with nitrogen to firm them up and sometimes that doesn't work.

[Lbfrozen]

We had multiple Fuze cans in a recent order that were not completely full of the drink, much less any added gas. Many were thrown out. Unless there is a very rare manufacturing problem - which is doubtful, since we are talking about different drinks and drinks over time - the weakness you feel in lemonade, fruit punch, tea, and Gatorade cans is only the lack of carbonation or added gas, as mentioned above. When shaken, carbonated drinks reach an allowable pressure inside the can, and they fizz very little after that. The journey to your machine gets them all to about the same pressure, hence the consistency in the way the can feels. Non-carbonated drinks have a wider range of pressure, resulting in the "weird" ones.

 

Can drinks with less pressure than a soda can jam a column in a stacker drink machine, but that depends heavily on the machine brand, model, and setup. For instance, my Royal 650's might jam on a Minute Maid Lemonade can, but my (Coke's) Royal 660's never jam. The best way to avoid problems is to keep the stack of drinks as low as possible without selling out between servicing.

 

As for the feel of these cans, after thousands of them tossed into machines, non of them feel "normal" to me. Generally, those drinks just do not taste very good out of a can, anyway. As for customer satisfaction, if they have drank non-carbonated drinks from a can, they already know what the can feels like and you will likely never hear a single comment about it.

 

Soft cans do well in non-vertical stackers (like an Antares!), and YMMV with glassfront machines (but they normally do just fine).

[orsd]

Soft cans do well in non-vertical stackers (like an Antares!),

GTFO. Now. Get up. Out the door. Parking lot. Car. Now. Goodbye.