Seeking Even Tighter Control over Thermal Processes

It’s a proven, traditional process, but that doesn’t mean thermal processing of food & beverage products has gone stale. In fact, innovation in operations devoted to cooking, smoking, frying, tempering, etc., continues to make those processes safer, more efficient and more stable.

“The advances in thermal processing have been more incremental, but still significant,” explains Lee Koepke, vice president of operational integration for Stampede Culinary Partners, a sous vide processor supplying restaurants, retailers and other channels. “Thermal processing has just become safer and more efficient.”

The ability for processors to be significantly more precise in application of heat to product and to better dial in their controls over temperature, humidity and air flow has gotten really strong in recent years, says Zachary Andrews, senior corporate director of food safety and quality assurance for Charcuterie Artisans (which owns the Creminelli Fine Meats and Daniele businesses).

“Technology has really come a long way in the last several years in terms of monitoring to make sure we hit our lethality requirements and that there’s less variability in our processes,” Andrews adds. “Innovation today revolves around smart sensors, Wi-Fi capabilities and the ability to monitor rooms incrementally and remotely.”

For Nelson Gaydos, outreach specialist for the American Assn. of Meat Processors (AAMP), changes in technology have been spurred along by the revisions about four years ago of USDA-FSIS appendices A and B, which regulate cooking and stabilization of meat and poultry products, respectively.

“Humidity became a much bigger requirement,” he says. “A lot of processors had to upgrade their smokehouses and embrace new technology, because sometimes it was very tedious to meet the humidity requirements with older machinery.”

Those upgrades, in turn, brought advancements in the amount of data that processors could capture and use to monitor the process, he adds.

Andrews says automation in terms of pre-setting cooking, temperature and fermentation parameters for individual products also has helped processors reduce variability from batch to batch, allowing Charcuterie Artisans, for one, to “produce large batches over and over with consistency, and because things are programmed, there's a lot less energy usage as well.”

In a large facility, such as Charcuterie Artisans’ 600,000-sq.-ft. plant in Rhode Island, monitoring energy consumption can make a big difference to the bottom line, making sure product is fully cooked but not overdone. Furthermore, keeping process times under control helps maximize throughput, Andrews adds.

“In order for us to be able to maximize the amount of product that we can produce, we need to make sure thermal processes are as short as possible,” he says. “We don't want to have to extend cook times unnecessarily.”

Seeking uniformity

Even with the leaps technology has taken when it comes to consistency and safety, Koepke says ensuring more uniform heating all the way through each product remains a daily challenge for processors, no matter whether the plant is using a smokehouse, oven or sous vide system. Charcuterie Artisans sees similar challenges, Andrews says.

“Especially with our larger-diameter products, we're always up against making sure we get uniform heat penetration and that we're not getting fat separations,” he explains. “We don’t want the product to be dry and unappetizing, so we would love to see technology that’s reliable and repeatable, and that continues to improve over the years.”

Being able to monitor temperatures and then adjust airflow and product runs accordingly is the key. Gaydos reminds processors “there’s always going to be cold spots; they may be smaller or there may be fewer of them, but it’s just the way thermodynamics happen.”

Additional advancement toward lowering energy costs and reduction of water consumption can help processors like Stampede meet their sustainability goals, Koepke adds. Furthermore, even though it’s a bit of what he calls a “Star Trek” idea, monitoring every single package through the system would pay off in terms of guaranteeing quality and safety of each product.

“Maybe there's some type of sensor in the packaging itself to monitor things,” he says. “But imagine if every package that went through had some type of self-monitoring on it that you could program into that packaging?”

For the time being, temperature monitoring probes have been improving at a rapid pace to lend a hand. Wireless probes, for example, have been developed in the last decade or so to help companies stay compliant with regulations and keep tabs on equipment performance.

“We can see information a lot more quickly and then make decisions right away,” Andrews says. “And if there are deviations or a room goes down, we can respond more quickly.”

AI: A ‘hot’ topic

Of course, the next frontier comes in the world of data analysis and whatever role artificial intelligence (AI) might play in taking the industry to the next level of consistency, safety and quality. Koepke relays that collecting data from a thermal process is a great step, but a plant needs to dedicate itself to doing something more with that data, starting with finding good analysts.

“You can’t look at the data once a week or once a month or once every six months; you have to look at it consistently and frequently,” he advises. “We have employees whose responsibilities include looking at the process data and raising any red flags if they see them.”

Stampede also currently uses AI tools to help take the data and make it more easily digestible for the employees, he adds. AI has been taught to locate and highlight the important data points and condense the message down around those points.

Some processors or plant management might feel intimidated or uninterested in pulling more data from the process and using AI to analyze that information. Gaydos says that’s a factor of sticking with what has worked best in the past, but he then advises processors to consider what could happen if something goes wrong in the process.

“If you build up a good history of data and show consistency, that can be helpful if an issue arises,” he explains. “It wouldn’t be scientific supporting documentation, but the data you generate yourself with your own equipment in your facility can help you improve efficiency in your process and with your employees.”

Charcuterie Artisans does just that, pulling in thousands of data points in a single production run, multiplied by four runs a day, six days a week, analyzing that information to build predictive models to monitor its equipment.

“Our ability to kind of leverage AI for data validations, trending analysis and those types of tools really gives us even more confidence in our validated processes,” Andrews says. “And, if we see a certain oven is taking a little bit longer month-over-month to hit temperature, there are predictive models that tell us that oven is trending in the wrong direction.”

Koepke adds the fact that sensors can be placed on machinery such as conveyors, where data can be analyzed, often by AI tools, to help maintenance teams become more predictive than reactive, minimizing downtime on the floor. Finally, he notes that the possible capabilities for AI are impressive.

“AI is just going to get better for maintenance, food safety and for thermal processing as well, finding ways to be able to predict the cooking process of products,” he says. “And then, if for some reason the cooking process starts to go off track, AI can help the technology adjust and correct itself.”