Nancy Shang | Founder & CEO, MICET | Updated July 24, 2026
Owning a canning or bottling line usually pays off once your weekly packaging volume is high enough that per-case mobile canning fees exceed what financing, labor, and CIP would cost in-house. That threshold is something you can calculate with a straightforward CPM comparison, not something you can read off a throughput spec sheet alone.
Owning a Line vs Paying Per Case: The Real Comparison
Craft breweries packaging under a few hundred cases a month generally lean on mobile canning services or a contract packager, paying a fee per case or per minute of run time and avoiding the capital outlay entirely. Breweries running weekly packaging on a fixed schedule usually reach a point where that per-case fee, multiplied out over a year, costs more than owning the line would. The comparison isn’t about which option is “better” in the abstract. It’s about where your specific volume sits relative to that crossover point.
| Factor | In-house line | Mobile / contract canning |
| Upfront cost | Capital purchase, financed or paid outright | None — pay per run |
| Cost as volume grows | Falls per case as volume increases | Stays roughly flat per case regardless of volume |
| Scheduling | You control run days and changeover timing | Booked around the provider’s route or contract calendar |
| DO / process control | You own the fill parameters and can tune them per batch | Provider sets fill parameters; consistency depends on their equipment and crew |
| Labor | Requires trained line operators and QC staff | Often includes the operating crew |
| Best fit | Breweries with steady weekly volume and multiple SKUs | Breweries packaging occasionally or still validating demand |
Neither column is free of downside. Owning a line ties up capital that could otherwise go into fermentation capacity or a second brewhouse vessel, and it adds a QC and maintenance workload that a contract packager absorbs for you. Paying per case protects cash flow but caps your control over fill parameters, and you’re competing for schedule slots with every other brewery on that provider’s route.
Calculate Your Breakeven Point in Five Steps
- Total what you’ve actually paid a mobile or contract canner over the last 12 months, per case or per minute, including any minimum-run fees.
- Estimate the annual cost of owning a line: equipment financing or depreciation, one or two line operators’ wages, CIP consumables, and routine maintenance.
- Divide the estimated annual in-house cost by your average external cost per case. That gives you the case volume at which owning breaks even against what you’re paying now.
- Compare that breakeven number to your actual packaging volume for the past year, and to where you expect volume to be in the next 12 to 18 months — not just this year’s total.
- Rerun the math whenever your SKU count changes. More SKUs mean more changeovers per week, which lowers effective throughput on an owned line and pushes the breakeven point higher than a single-SKU calculation would suggest.
This is a framework, not a fixed number. Financing terms, local labor cost, and how many SKUs you run all move the breakeven point, so the five steps above are meant to be filled in with your own figures rather than a published industry average.
Dissolved Oxygen: The Metric That Decides Shelf Life
Seam integrity gets most of the attention in packaging conversations, but dissolved oxygen picked up during the fill is often the bigger driver of how fast a can or bottle stales on the shelf. Isobaric filling, where the container is pressurized to match headspace pressure before beer flows in, reduces the turbulence that pulls oxygen into the liquid during fill. A fill temperature at or below roughly 4°C also matters, since warmer beer foams more during fill and foam is a direct oxygen-pickup path. Vacuum filling, and a “double vacuum” step some filling machines support, pulls headspace air out before or during fill specifically to cut oxygen pickup further.
The misconception worth correcting: a can that seams perfectly can still stale early if DO pickup during fill was high. Seam quality and DO control are two separate failure modes, and a QC program that only checks seams is missing half the shelf-life picture. This matters more for some styles than others — hazy IPAs and other hop-forward, oxygen-sensitive styles show staling and hop fade noticeably faster than clean lagers at the same DO level, so a brewery running a hazy-heavy lineup should weight DO control higher in its QC priorities than one running mostly lagers.
Canning Line vs Bottling Line: Specs Side by Side
A fully automatic can filling line, as configured for craft breweries, typically pairs a can washer with a filling and capping stage running 12 filling nozzles and one capping head at 1000 to 1200 cans per hour, filling at or below 4°C with a filling accuracy around ±5mm and an isobaric fill method. Downstream, a drying stage handles roughly 100 cans per minute, a laser coder prints date, time, batch number, category, and serial number for traceability, and a labeling stage runs 80 to 200 cans per minute depending on label size and can diameter.
An 8-head bottle filling and capping machine, by comparison, runs at a lower headline rate of 480 to 500 bottles per hour, sized for 275ml and 750ml formats, paired with a 3-label labeling machine holding ±1mm labeling accuracy at 25 to 40 bottles per minute, plus a CO2 mixer for carbonation control ahead of filling. For breweries not yet ready to commit to a full line, a standalone beer filling machine is also available in 4-head, 6-head, or 8-head configurations, covering beer, cider, kombucha, and other carbonated drinks with vacuum filling as a base feature.
Can lines and bottle lines aren’t interchangeable investments. The can line’s higher hourly throughput fits breweries running larger weekly volumes across fewer SKUs; the bottle line’s dual-format capability (275ml and 750ml on the same machine) fits breweries running smaller batches across more package sizes, including bomber-format releases.
Seam and Cap QC: What to Check Every Shift
- Pull a sample can or bottle at line startup and check seam or cap closure visually before running a full batch through.
- Track fill accuracy against the machine’s rated tolerance during the run, not just at startup, since fill accuracy can drift as a shift goes on.
- Confirm fill temperature is holding at or below the rated threshold; a rising fill temperature partway through a run is often the first sign of a chiller or glycol issue, not a filler issue.
- Do a teardown seam inspection on the schedule your quality program defines, since seam integrity can look fine externally while still failing a cut-away check.
- Spot-check the laser coding output each shift, since a coding error that isn’t caught until a customer complaint arrives makes traceability far harder during a recall.
Certification: What a Filling Line Should Have on File
These documents establish that the filling and labeling equipment category has been independently tested against EU machinery and EMC standards. They don’t replace asking the supplier to confirm which certificate applies to the exact model and configuration you’re ordering, since attestations are typically issued against a defined equipment scope rather than every individual unit.
What These Lines Cost
Pricing for canning lines, bottling lines, and standalone filling machines is not published; get a quote against your specific throughput target, format mix, and whether you need washing, drying, coding, and labeling bundled into one line or added separately. This is different from MICET’s brewhouse systems, where published ranges exist (30,000–80,000 USD for microbrewery-scale systems, 50,000–80,000 USD for a 10bbl-minimum commercial system) — packaging lines don’t currently carry a published range, so treat any number you see elsewhere as a starting estimate to verify, not a quote.
Compared to the typical vendor product page on this topic, which usually stops at a throughput number and a photo, the breakeven math above is what actually decides whether owning a line makes financial sense for your specific volume.
FAQ
Q: What does CPM mean in canning line economics?
A: It stands for cost per minute of packaging run time, used to compare what a mobile or contract canner charges against what an in-house line would cost to run for the same amount of time. There’s no universal CPM figure; it’s calculated from your own quotes and operating costs.
Q: At what volume does owning a canning line usually make sense?
A: There’s no fixed number that applies to every brewery, since financing terms and labor cost vary by region. Run the five-step breakeven calculation above against your own numbers rather than relying on a rule of thumb.
Q: Is dissolved oxygen control more important than seam quality?
A: They’re separate risks, not competing ones. A can can seam correctly and still stale early from high DO pickup during fill, so both need checking, not just one.
Q: Can one machine handle both cans and bottles?
A: Not on the same run. Can lines and bottle lines are separate equipment; a beer filling machine bought for bottles won’t fill cans without a different filling head and line configuration.
Q: Do smaller breweries need the full can line, or just a filling machine?
A: A standalone 4-, 6-, or 8-head filling machine covers a brewery not yet running enough volume to justify washing, drying, coding, and labeling stages bundled together. Add those stages once volume and SKU count justify the automation.