Sachets of flexible film forming material are known. In the food packaging industry it has been conventional to "form, fill and seal". That is the individual flexible container is formed, it is then filled with food product and the container sealed. This means that one filling head can fill only one container at a time, For small containers production times are increased because the time taken to bring the container into alignment with the filling head and then to remove it, is significant and the volume of product filled from any filling head is correspondingly reduced when smaller containers are filled.
For consumer use and for applications where measured quantities of product are desirable in disposable containers there is a demand for small volume containers.
The cost to food packagers of using a form, fill and seal method as opposed to buying preformed packages and only filling and sealing is also significant. However preformed packages especially for small volumes are difficult to handle. Further where aseptic techniques are used sterilization becomes a problem. Thus in these applications the form, fill and seal method has been seen to be advantageous because a sterilization step can be carried out between the forming and filling sequences.
A number of proposals have been made to increase the volume of production of small containers using the form, fill, seal method. U.S. Pat. No. 4,517,787 is a recent example and U.K. No. 2054511 is an example of forming and filling a plurality of small compartments which are subsequently separated to form individual packages.