Food & Beverage Automation: Two Levels of Advancement
Key Takeaways
- Advances in sensor and imaging technology have enhanced robotic accuracy, enabling better handling of variability in food processing.
- Cost reductions and 'robot as a service' models are lowering barriers to automation for mid-sized companies, accelerating industry adoption.
- Integration challenges persist, especially where fine control and interfacing with existing machinery are required.
Over the last decade-plus, food and beverage processors have installed plenty of automation to help make their products faster, with top-line efficiency and a sharp focus on safety of both the product and the workforce. Still, various segments of the industry remain in the fledgling stages of reaping the benefits of these technologies.
In fact, it’s almost a tale of two cities, says Ozan Ozaskinli, partner and managing director for Value Gene Consulting Group.
“On the beverage side, there’s much more automation and robotics users — we see 80-85 percent of the process automated — because it is much easier to automate the beverage process,” he says. “On the food side, however, from automation perspective, it’s really lagging behind, with closer to an average of 10-15 percent of the processes truly automated.”
In a bakery, every batch of dough behaves differently; in a meat plant, every animal that comes into the facility is slightly different. Food processors have focused on the packaging operations to reap the benefits of automation, since the processing areas of those plants are much more difficult to standardize and implement automation. But things appear to be evolving, Ozaskinli adds.
“There are more options: Robotic arms are becoming more versatile and flexible, and can have more tools,” he says. “It’s not just on rigid, static arm doing just one a single task.”
Indeed, innovative solutions continue to be developed to address the needs of food processors who are looking to solve the ever-present workforce challenges, whether that means employing enough skilled people to produce products or keeping them safe and healthy by taking away the most physically demanding tasks and giving them to robots instead.
“Labor efficiency is always that conversation starter,” says Chafik Barbar, founder and CEO of Marble Technologies, which recently gained support from the state of Nebraska’s agtech startup incubator The Combine for its work to build robotic solutions for the meatpacking industry. “But also, how does automation it improve yield? how does it make the jobs easier and products safer, from a food safety aspect?”
Breakthroughs in sensor and imaging technology have allowed robotics to really advance in recent years, with the ability to process, analyze and offer functional feedback to the robot also growing exponentially recently. That computing power has led to improved accuracy and decision-making by the automated systems being installed in food processing facilities, according to Barbar.
He adds that, mechanically (dexterity of the robots) and analytically (imaging and sensing), the technology can typically handle the variance from animal to animal — they are fast enough and accurate enough to make the right cuts without jeopardizing yield or safety. However, it’s one thing to be able to perform in controlled, lab-type environments and another to operate the same way in the ruckus of a meat plant.
“In the real world, can sensing keep up with all the external factors and still execute with precision from one cut to the next?” he says. “That’s what everybody’s working toward: How do we do this consistently and not just one off here and there.”
Fewer roadblocks to getting started
The good news for those looking to invest in more automation? Cost has tempered enough to allow more companies to consider jumping in on some of these solutions, Ozaskinli says.
“The technology isn’t the bottleneck anymore for robotics, and the second challenge had been cost,” he says. “But now there are ‘robot as a service’ models as well, which helps reduce the capital expense in the very beginning of the process, making it a lot more manageable especially for mid-sized companies.”
One of the remaining challenges that processors need to overcome still, he says, is the gap that exists between the investment expectations and the implementation timelines, particularly for the first-timers getting into the technology. From the point of standardization and gathering of data to purchase, ordering, building and installation, to seeing measurable results, it can take as much as two years for some processors.
Jim Vortherms, senior director, Control Systems Integration, for CRB, says that, although it has improved, dexterity of the robots for really fine control applications still poses a challenge. Furthermore, processors need to find the right integrators that really understand the process and how to interface with the machinery to get the outcomes they need.
“A lot of people can do the general automation, but when you start getting into integration with the robots, that’s where it becomes much more challenging,” Vortherms says.
Despite the hurdles processors still face, Ozaskinli believes the wave of implementation will continue to push more of them forward. He believes beverage processors could be well on their way to automating enough of the process that we could see “lights out” facilities in the not-to-distant future. For food processing, even though they’re playing more catchup with beverage manufacturers, the future remains bright for automation there — and that future will be here soon.
“There will still be maybe 30 percent of tasks that need to be managed manually, due to things such as allergy management, washdown requirements, etc.,” he concludes. “But I don’t see any major bottleneck stopping a typical food plant from having 70 percent of the tasks fully automated in the next three to five years.”
Vortherms says even the washdown challenges are seeing some interesting solutions evolving, with big advancements in cleanability of various robots and areas of equipment that didn’t seem attainable a few years ago.
“Even some of the electrical components you’d never have thought could get wet, I’ve seen demos of them getting hosed down, and it doesn’t damage them,” he says. “So there’s definitely advancements happening when it comes to keeping components dry during washdowns.”
About the Author
Andy Hanacek
Senior Editor
Andy Hanacek has covered meat, poultry, bakery and snack foods as a B2B editor for nearly 20 years, and has toured hundreds of processing plants and food companies, sharing stories of innovation and technological advancement throughout the food supply chain. In 2018, he won a Folio:Eddie Award for his unique "From the Editor's Desk" video blogs, and he has brought home additional awards from Folio and ASBPE over the years. In addition, Hanacek led the Meat Industry Hall of Fame for several years and was vice president of communications for We R Food Safety, a food safety software and consulting company.