If there is one industry that we just cannot do without, it has to be the food industry. I’ve been in this business for several decades now and it remains constant year over year. People just have to eat … there is no way around it. For the record, I’m not in the food business, but I am in the business of selling equipment to the food processing plants, so my comments are more technology-focused than food-focused.
For an industry that grows year over year, we see that cost containment or expense reduction in food processing plants is as vigorous as ever. For most food processing companies, sacrificing the quality of the product they produce to get to a lower cost is just not the answer. So, like most other process industries, food companies are finding ways to improve productivity throughout the plant with the use of factory automation. Whether it be in the actual processing of the food or the packaging of the food, automation is everywhere in today’s modern food plants.
Just to show my age, when I was much, much younger, I remember watching the “I Love Lucy” show. In one episode, clip Lucille Ball was working in a chocolate factory. As the candy would come out of the machine, she was responsible for grabbing it off the conveyor belt and wrapping it in paper. It started well, and she was wrapping one chocolate about every five seconds. Pretty soon, she couldn’t keep up and chocolates were falling on the floor, she was eating what she couldn’t wrap, creating a big mess and costing the company a lot of money in wasted product. Whatever could go wrong, did go wrong.
To learn more, read "Automation in the Food Industry: Past, Present & Future" from Food Processing.
