Food and Beverage Manufacturing Top Stories

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As product portfolios expand and production requirements become increasingly complex, manufacturers are under growing pressure to maintain efficiency with systems originally designed for predictable, repetitive production.

EIC Alyse Thompson-Richards highlights recent food and beverage industry developments, including Ferrara’s South Carolina plant, Ferrero’s line installation, Conagra Brands’ expansion in Arkansas, Walmart’s new milk processing facility, Kraft Heinz’s investment in Canada, and Swaggerty Farms’ expansion.

Effective environmental monitoring programs are defined not by how much data they collect, but by how quickly they trace data forward and backward to isolate the source and analyze the impact.

With unplanned downtime costing up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour, food manufacturers are rethinking how they monitor and maintain the systems that keep production moving. Conveyor systems offer a scalable and cost-effective starting point for predictive maintenance.

You know the origins of all your ingredients and everything that happened during the processing, cooling and freezing of your product, but what can you know about your product once it leaves your premises? This is the job of the track part of track-and-trace.

Dharma Prime and Halak Mehta are inspiring examples of women thriving in STEM careers, particularly in engineering and food science. As they share their experiences and insights, they highlight the importance of diversity and support in these traditionally male-dominated fields.

Food and beverage plants require predictive, remote and machine-embedded tools on packaging machinery to ensure uptime, but operator shadowing and hands-on repetition are equally important for operational efficiency.

In an evolving manufacturing landscape, leaders are leveraging AI and advanced analytics to enhance efficiency and decision-making. Contextual data and real-time insights are driving innovation, allowing companies like Ruiz Foods and Kraft Heinz to unlock significant value and optimize operations.

For cultured meats to succeed in the market, they will have to prove themselves cost-effective to produce, be as food-safe as their conventional counterparts and gain acceptance from consumers — though some states have already banned FDA-approved cultured meats.

The organizations, which have long published parallel industry reports, have joined forces to offer food manufacturers and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) an overview of market performance and a glimpse at what to expect going forward.