First, the difference that matters
You are not choosing between a good factory and a bad factory. You are usually choosing between a factory and a trading office that presents itself as one. Both can ship you a machine. Only one of them can change the machine when your customer asks for something different.
The test is simple and it does not require a factory audit: ask a question about the process, not the product. "What pressure do you test the bottle at?" or "how is the infuser sub-assembly checked?" A trading office forwards the question and comes back with a price. A factory answers it in the first person.
Ten questions, and what a real answer sounds like
1. Who actually makes the machine you are quoting me?
Ask for the legal name on the business licence, then check it appears on the quotation and the invoice. If the licence name, the quotation and the shipping documents are three different companies, find out why before you pay anything.
2. Can I see the line running, live?
Not a photo pack, not a factory video with music. A video call where you ask them to walk to the assembly station and hold the phone there. Every real factory will do this. It costs them ten minutes and it is the cheapest due diligence available.
3. What is your daily capacity, and how loaded are you right now?
The number matters less than the second half of the question. A factory that tells you its peak capacity but not its current load is telling you half an answer. Ours is 2,000 machines and 3,200 bottles a day, and we will tell you what share of that is already committed.
4. Who do I talk to when something goes wrong?
Ask to be introduced to the engineer who will own your project, by name, before you sign. If the answer is "you talk to me and I talk to them", you are buying through a translation layer — and every change you request will lose something on the way through.
5. Do you design, or do you copy?
Ask what the factory owns, not what it can source. Patents are public and checkable, which makes them a good filter: we hold 60 granted patents across 4° and MIA, 56 still in force, covering one-way air intake, automatic bottle seating and two-stage pressure release. A factory that designs its own products can change one; a factory that copies cannot.
6. What testing does every unit get — not a sample?
This is the question that separates a real production line from a workshop. Sample testing is easy to pass. Ask what happens to every unit, and get the answer as a number of checks per station. Ours is two 100% high-pressure tests — one at the sub-assembly stage, one on the finished machine with the bottle fitted — plus a 2 MPa destructive burst test on every batch of bottles, so that a bottle rated at 1.8 MPa does not fail.
7. Who owns the moulds, and what happens when they wear out?
Two questions, one purpose: find out whether the tooling is an asset you control or a lever someone else holds. Get ownership, storage location, maintenance responsibility and the conditions for transferring the moulds written into the agreement. "We will sort it out" is how tooling disputes start.
8. Which certificates do you hold, and can I see the originals?
Ask for the certificate number and the issuing body, then check them on the issuer's register. We publish ours openly: ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 (scope: R&D and assembly of soda makers), BSCI social audit, packaging PPWR, LFGB and FDA for food contact, RoHS and REACH for materials, PET GB 4806.6, and CoS, MSDS, TPED and DOT for the CO₂ cylinders. The scans are on our patents and certificates page.
9. Where are the pressure-critical parts made?
On a soda maker, the parts that see pressure are the bottle, the seal and the valve. If a factory buys all three in, your pressure performance is its supplier's to control. We blow-mould our own bottles in a 300 m² dust-free workshop — which is why wall thickness, shape and pressure rating are ours to change rather than someone else's to negotiate. There is a separate guide on that.
10. What is the exit?
Ask what happens if you want to leave: does the tooling transfer, at what cost, and how long does it take. A supplier who cannot describe your exit is telling you the relationship is not designed to be survivable. Ours is a written answer, and it is a fair question to ask anyone.
Four red flags
- A price that arrives in hours and never changes. Real tooling and real compliance have costs that move when your requirements move.
- Certificates as a picture file. Every legitimate certificate has a number and an issuer with a register. Ask for both.
- No engineer on the call. If nobody technical will speak to you before the order, nobody technical is going to answer for it after.
- Capacity that only exists on paper. Ask what share of it is committed. A factory that is genuinely full will tell you the shipping date moved.
How to run this without a factory visit
Questions 1, 4, 5, 6 and 8 can all be answered in one video call, because they are about documents and process rather than about scale. Questions 2, 3 and 9 need a camera pointed at the line. Question 7 and 10 are answered on paper, before you sign — and if you are given a vague answer, that is the answer.
If you want to see how the answers look when the whole sequence is written out, our drawing to delivery page goes from structure drawing to shipped unit, and the design and made page shows the plant as it is, including the stations that do the checking.
Send us the questions you were going to ask another supplier. We will answer them in public and in detail — including the ones that are inconvenient.