The origins of HST Maschinenbau date back to 1949, when the company’s founder, Ingeborg Sauter, began packing and selling tea bags by hand. Even at that time, the first mechanical devices were developed to simplify the manual work. Since those early days, the ongoing modernisation of the tea-packing process has gone hand in hand with developments in mechanical engineering.

In the early years, small semi-automatic tea bag machines were designed and built, which were soon being used not only in-house but also by tea packers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
The PT-5 was the first tea bag machine for the production of single-chamber bags without string or label, followed by the PT-10 with string and label. This was the first HST model, which, as a global market success, was produced in large numbers and sold worldwide. The PT-10 was replaced around 1972 by the PT-20 series, in which the double-chamber bag replaced the simple single-chamber bag. First came the PT-21 for so-called ‘naked’ tea bags, and later in the 1970s the PT-25 for paper-wrapped bags was added. In the early 1990s, the model for tea bags with single aroma protection, the PT-33, was developed to production readiness.

The growing number of tea packets sold necessitated the construction of the company’s own wrapping machines (cellophane wrapping machines), such as the ZE-10 model, built in the 1960s, which was extremely smooth-running and robust, and which was succeeded by the high-speed ZE-30 wrapping machine. Initially designed solely for tea packets, this machine was soon adapted to handle a wide range of formats. This new machine type was manufactured from 1983 onwards and sold in large numbers worldwide, particularly to the food and cosmetics industries, but also for specialist applications such as cassettes, CDs and DVDs.

Many other devices and designs were developed over the years, such as gluing machines, cardboard box erectors and bundle packers.

Over time, many hundreds of machines and devices of all types and ages have been used in production at the company’s two in-house tea packing facilities in Germany. This is akin to a permanent test operation, enabling the experience gained to be passed directly on to the machine-building department and thus ensuring continuous improvements – a stroke of luck that not every supplier of tea bag machines can claim for themselves. This is a factor that ultimately benefits not only our own packing plants but also our many international customers. In this way, the PT series has also been continuously developed and improved.

Today, HST’s machinery is perfectly tailored to the needs of the tea processing industry. Its facilities, machinery and workforce meet all the criteria expected of a modern engineering company. Dozens of companies around the world successfully use HST tea packaging machines.