- Published 13 Mar 2024
- Last Modified 13 Mar 2024
- 8 min
Innovations in Food and Beverage Manufacturing
Explore the innovations and automation used in food and beverage manufacturing to stay ahead of industry challenges and keep up with consumer trends.
Food and beverage manufacturing automation brings us the products we consume and enjoy every day. To stay competitive while meeting consumer needs, which become more varied and complex every day, the food manufacturing industry is embracing innovations to maximise efficiency, improve sustainability, and better control supply chains and traceability.
Challenges in Food and Beverage Manufacturing
Regulations: Manufactured food products must meet regulations covering things like food safety and hazardous material handling. These set minimum acceptability standards for product quality, packaging, storage, and transportation. This challenge increases for products sold to multiple regulatory regions.
Quality Control: Well-planned quality control can help a business meet regulations and address challenges like material consistency. Consumers expect individual food products to be the same and available all the time, but that is difficult to achieve with agricultural seasonality and the occasional poor-quality batch. Diligently sampling and inspecting batches can help assure product uniformity and mitigate this uncertainty.
Traceability: Quality control also establishes the traceability required for recalls. Logging each batch’s materials and finished products’ endpoints is vital for knowing where to issue recalls and forming plans to implement them.
Perishability: Food manufacturing’s raw materials have expiry dates, as do their finished products. Materials management must carefully manage this to avoid producing unsafe food and to minimise business losses from expired inventory.
Material Waste: Spoilage is a principal source of material waste losses in food and beverage manufacturing, but waste also comes up in processes such as mixing, cooking, forming, and packaging. Also, material residue on equipment can cause odours, corrosion, and health hazards, so food and beverage manufacturing requires frequent deep cleaning.
Food Industry Innovations
To compete for the loyalty of the increasingly scrutinous consumer, innovations in food and beverage manufacturing are leaning into the innovations of Industry 4.0 to maximise efficiency.
Packaging
Robotics and automation in food industry packaging are well-established, and they are becoming more advanced all the time. Robotics in food industry packaging can now use advanced machine vision to pick products of varying sizes and orientations and load them properly into packaging systems. These industrial robots can improve packaging efficiency since they can work around different sizes and cuts of meat (and many other foods) and get them all into their proper packaging.
Extreme temperatures, pressures, and sanitation chemicals are often thrown at food and beverage manufacturing automation technologies. Innovations in stainless steel robotics in food industry packaging allow these machines to operate better in these conditions and withstand rigorous cleaning.
Food packaging is challenging to make sustainable since it must be sterile, lightweight, sealable, and cost-effective. This has long meant very wasteful, single-use, plastic materials. Consumers, investors, and retailers are demanding the food manufacturing industry improve its packaging game, and it is stepping up.
Biodegradable material advances include food packaging made from seaweed, mushrooms, coconut husk, sugarcane, and more.
Smart packaging innovations include materials that change colour based on food temperature, sensors that detect the gases of decaying produce, and RFID tags that transmit food history and status to organising systems. These can all help you reduce waste by using up food before it spoils.
Special packaging can also actively preserve food by automatically reducing oxygen content to deter the growth of bacteria and microbes.
Sterilisation
Given its immense importance, innovations in food and beverage manufacturing extend to ensuring safe consumption.
Foreign Object Detection: Advanced detector systems can identify metal or other foreign contaminants in food.
Detecting Spoilage: AI-driven electronic ‘noses’ can detect spoiled meat. These can help promptly dispose of spoiled food and also prevent wasting food that is past its printed expiry date but still truly safe.
IIoT Integration: Sensors integrated with a business’ systems can issue alerts for issues such as refrigerator temperatures dropping too low. Integrating these with apps lets workers quickly learn of these problems and address them in their early stages.
Sustainability
Both consumers and investors are driving food and beverage industry trends towards greater sustainability in material waste, packaging, energy usage, and ethical sourcing. Food industry technology is following accordingly, not just for reputational reasons but also for practical ones like energy efficiency.
Upcycling is the practice of usefully purposing material and by-products that would normally go to waste. Examples include:
- Imitation meat made from okara, a tofu and soymilk byproduct that retains nutritional value
- Specialty flours made using the spent grains from beer-brewing
- Probiotics made using starch-laden water reclaimed from potato processing
Some countries have upcycling certification programmes. These apply earned certifications to food labels, which encourage sales to sustainability-minded consumers. This in turn encourages the food manufacturing industry to keep employing upcycling.
Vertical agriculture grows fruits and vegetables indoors in vertical arrangements and with less soil. This allows for growing more food using less land and closer proximity to the consumer. This technique does use more energy, and the list of plants growable this way is small, but food industry innovations are continuing to make this an increasingly viable way to improve food sustainability.
Quality Control
When it comes to food and beverage manufacturing, quality control is essential for keeping customers satisfied and safe. Its innovations include:
- Supply Chain: Knowing the journeys of your ingredients and finished products will naturally help you root out quality issues. Advances in item tracking using RFID tags are helping to reduce supply chain uncertainty and its inherent lower assured quality
- Machine Vision: Machine vision technologies, IoT instrumentation, and AI can now detect food defects invisible to the human eye. This enables detecting bacteria, moisture, and irregular temperatures and reducing the number of food products shipped with those defects
- Automation and Training: As you rely more on automation and control, you’ll need plans for tailoring it to detect poor-quality items. You’ll also need to establish training for cases where human quality verification is needed for automatically produced items
- Process Control: Process control systems can monitor and automatically adjust critical process parameters like temperature, ingredient quantities, and flow rate. Systems like Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) let you monitor these in real-time and adjust operations as needed to maintain quality
- Predictive Quality Control: IoT-enabled food and beverage manufacturing technology allows monitoring to detect poor performance. AI can use this collected data to in turn predict potential equipment problems and quality issues well before they happen
Supply Management
Given material shortages, rapidly changing consumer behaviour, and pandemic after-effects, supply chain management is an ongoing challenge in the food manufacturing industry. Innovations in food and beverage manufacturing software are seizing the concepts of Industry 4.0 to better understand and optimise their incoming and outgoing products.
Supply chain innovations in food traceability software allow businesses to:
- Maximise RFID tag usage for material tracking. Compared to barcodes, these tags are more durable, carry more information, and can be easily scanned at every step of a product’s journey. This allows reliable shipment tracking and reduced uncertainty
- Continuously log food traceability and quality information using blockchain technology
- Use AI to identify inefficiencies and potential for losses
- Deploy smart inventory technology to automatically order ingredients when supplies get low enough
- Show sustainability-minded end users the routes and impacts of their purchased products. This can provide proof of your company’s sustainability efforts and improve your reputation
Traceability
ERP food traceability software can optimise batch management by automatically recording and logging temperature, ingredients, and cooking time. These systems can easily scale and adjust based on batch sizes or product specifications.
Blockchain technology can contribute much to food traceability software since it can create an ongoing digital record of a product’s origin, manufacturing date, and ingredient traceability. This provides easy access to proof that food products are genuine and meet their required regulations.
Food traceability software can also add fingerprint-like markers to these info packages. These can be used to help fight counterfeiting by identifying products that didn’t end up where they should have been.
Trends to Watch in Food and Beverage Manufacturing
Food and beverage industry trends are rapidly developing and changing, and food and beverage technology will need to keep up.
- Digital Twins: As a key aspect of Industry 4.0, digital twins collect data from all of your facility’s IIoT devices to synchronously map your operations. This lets you detect equipment inefficiencies and problems you might not have otherwise noticed. You can also use digital twins when planning new food and beverage products. The twin can predict how efficiently your systems will handle the new product’s properties, letting you perfect and release sooner
- Labelling: As consumers demand more transparency about the products they consume, the food manufacturing industry will need to ensure adequate, truthful labels accordingly — and more importantly, establish and maintain the necessary supply chain and traceability measures for backing up labels’ claims
- Sustainability: Initiatives like upcycling, vertical farming, and biodegradable packaging are continuing to gain traction and will demand manufacturing solutions
Browse our site to learn more about how maintenance and automation will be vital for food and beverage manufacturing in the future.