As food & beverage processors struggle to find and retain production floor workers, they’ve had to turn to a different group to fill the gap — one driven by technology and automation, and one for which there seems to be endless potential.
With the rise of automation has come the rise of sensors needed in processing plants to ensure efficiency, safety and food & beverage quality. The fewer human beings present, the more capable sensor technology needs to become.
Look around any facility today, and you’re likely to see equipment that’s using some sort of sensor monitoring attributes and conditions related to quality, safety, process efficiency or equipment lifespan, among other bits of data. In turn, many processors have embraced sensor technology, the data it brings and the insights it can provide. Count Johanna Velez, vice president of quality assurance for Monin Americas, as one of them.
“A lot of these sensors help you see what you can’t see with your naked eye, and that is so helpful because we want to know if there’s something defective right away,” Velez says. “I want to capture a defect while the product is still here in the plant and we can make adjustments.”
Ensuring quality, consistency
Monin Americas, a division of global manufacturer Monin, which produces various flavored syrups, sauces and beverage bases and concentrates for the retail, foodservice and hospitality markets, opened a new U.S. manufacturing facility in Sparks, Nev., in 2020.
The company is always looking for ways to improve, and recently installed robotic arms to pick and place empty bottles onto the filling line in the interest of eliminating human contact with the bottles for food safety purposes.
The sensors involved in the operation of that robot, first and foremost, are critical to proper performance, but Velez adds that “because you have a mechanical arm moving around, employee safety is the other concern.”
Monin installed curtain-like sensors that will stop the robotic arms from moving if an employee should move or walk into the area through the curtains. Sensors in the packaging area also help newly installed robots appropriately place a pump in the boxes with each bottle of product, taking that task out of the hands of employees who might miss a box trying to keep up with the speed of production.
Additionally, Velez notes that the company has installed sensors that will not allow equipment to operate if the required filters are not in place, ensuring a critical control point for the facility is followed to a T.
On the product quality side, the Sparks facility uses X-ray sensors to check the fill level of bottles much more quickly and efficiently than workers on the line. Any overfilled or underfilled bottles are redirected to a reject area for rework. Meanwhile, vision systems can check the bottled product for any deficiencies, including reading the label to ensure that it is correctly applied to the proper product.
“There are so many tools we can use for quality control checks on the line, especially when the lines are running so fast,” she says. “You can check fill level, your caps, the labels, and the presence of a pump, all with automation and sensors instead of having an employee inspecting it.”
Sensing what’s coming
Velez would like to see the next generation of sensors include the ability to not only find an issue, but also determine where the problem originated, stop the line, resolve the issue with whatever equipment is involved, and restart the lines to produce the product properly.
Ryan Thompson, senior specialist at CRB focused on Industry 4.0 practices, says technology continues to advance quickly, to where that type of thinking may not be too far-fetched. “The most important changes have occurred with the rapid move toward network sensors,” he says. Network sensors significantly improve commissioning and calibration times, and reduce the total input/output count, Thompson adds.
“Perhaps more importantly, though, network sensors allow for contextualized data to be collected. The data can be used by control systems or made available to different systems if or where needed.”
Thompson says he is personally excited about getting to the plug-and-produce stage, “where very little, if any, programming is needed to connect sensors to systems.”
Low-cost, easy-to-install, wireless Internet of Things (IoT) sensors have become more widespread in food & beverage applications. These types of sensors today find jobs serving specific purposes, such as monitoring temperature and vibration on motors, and sending that information to a predictive maintenance system, Thompson says. He believes the next major step for processors revolves around using smart sensors to optimize processes.
“It is easy enough to recognize anomalies within a control system — such as when a parameter is out of specification — something that food & beverage companies already use their control systems for,” he explains. “But what most food & beverage companies are not set up for is to leverage sensor data as part of an overall data strategy, and leveraging tools like advanced analytics and AI.”
Challenges around processors’ networks and cybersecurity remain barriers to entry. Thompson says companies looking to scale up their networked sensor technology must carefully consider the benefits and drawbacks regarding risk.
“Networked sensors are great, but they require a well-designed control system (OT) network, otherwise they can cause major headaches,” he explains. “Similarly, IoT devices require internet connectivity.”
On the flip side, innovation has dragged the cost of entry down, meaning price is not as big a barrier to entry as it may have been in the past. Smart sensors are included in that group.
“Over the past 10 years, flow meters and conductivity meters have generally been network-enabled — but these are often expensive sensors,” Thompson adds. “As the technology continues to mature, we are seeing all sorts of networked instruments, such as temperature and pressure.”
In the future, Thompson says, the industry can expect to see an increase in higher-value and niche offerings such as sensors and software, which in turn will help ensure that bakeries produce a perfect, golden-brown product or that sauces have an exact flavor profile, density and droplet size.
With the sheer amount of tasks that sensors can accomplish and the software and tools to analyze and help processors react to the data collected, technology in this area continues to push the industry closer to more consistency, safety and quality no matter the product on the line.
