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As with many prominent global industries, the food industry has had to re-think its processes in the past few years to ensure food safety is at the heart of business. Of course, food safety has always been critical, but with the added risk of viruses and the pandemic, it is more crucial now than ever before.
Thankfully, automation has solved many challenges regarding food safety and other issues that have come to light in recent years.
What is Food Industry Automation?
There are four types of automation that can be applied to different industries. But, as we are discussing the food industry, we will provide an example of each of these automation types within this sector:
Fixed Automation
An example of a fixed automation system in the food industry would be a conveyor belt that helps to package food products without human interference. This is likely a popular automation type chosen by mass production companies or large food businesses.
Programmable Automation
This type of automation is delivered through a software system that has been programmed to carry out a task. Usually, manufacturing companies use ERP systems to track their stock efficiently and to have more accessible and proactive live inventory management.
Flexible Automation
This is another type of computer-controlled automation applied by process manufacturing in the food industry. So, where workers may have manually put formulas or recipes together in the past, this can now be automated through machinery to mix ingredients, etc.
Integrated Automation
This form of automation has minimal human involvement and is handled by computers. This automation could be used in the food industry to process packaging designs or control numerical machine tools.
How is Automation Helping the Food Industry Overcome Challenges?
Automation has many benefits for the food industry, from optimizing quality control and efficiency and making it easier to scale up individual businesses. The companies who benefit from automation don’t have to be large manufacturers; small food businesses can use automation during their initial recruitment periods. Or, if funds don’t allow an extensive employee list, companies can choose to use automation instead of hiring more workers.
This was beneficial during the pandemic when more companies realized the risks of bringing a high number of workers on site for daily activities. While this may be problematic for the employment side of things, from a business point of view, food companies can make more profit by having fewer people on their payroll and instead using different automation forms.
Pandemic and safety risks aside, we must point out the different benefits automation can have to those occupying the food industry;
Quality Control
When you think of machines that have been programmed and configured to work precisely, you can imagine that these results are more accurate than those of a human. When applying this to food industry practices, using machines in the manufacturing process helps to oversee that quality is of the highest standard.
For example, a drinks company uses a machine to measure ingredients for the product’s recipe. As a result, the company will have peace of mind that each drink has the exact measurements to keep the final taste consistent. And, if it seemed there was an issue, it would be easier to go through the manufacturing process and find the cause.
Traceability
Using food manufacturing ERP software or programmable automation makes a food company’s manufacturing process much easier to manage and trace. As a result, businesses can view their analytics and data to keep track of perishable products’ shelf life, maximizing profit and reducing waste.
This traceable data can also ensure the company is more reliable, as analytics can pick up inconsistencies. For example, if a machine isn’t performing as efficiently, the data will reflect this and make it easy to spot.
Reduce Waste
As we briefly touched upon above, an essential element of all food industry practices is to keep track of a product’s sell-by date to ensure they are sold according to this date to provide customers with a safe product and reduce the business’s waste.
Automation that keeps track of this data is advantageous and more efficient than manually making a spreadsheet or other logs that may have been used in the past.
Now is the Time to Dive into Automation
It is clear that food industry automation has been a critical component in keeping food safety to a high standard while providing more efficient ways to track produce, maximize sales, reduce waste and run quality tests.
Automation is an excellent tool for any company with the goal of working in the food industry. With various accessible ways of getting your hands on automation, such as ERP systems, there is no better time than now to dive into the world of automation.
