With a fluctuating economy and pressure to keep dairy prices low, the Maryland & Virginia Milk Producers Cooperative Association was looking for ways to improve product processes for its Laurel, MD, manufacturing plant, which processes butter, condensed milk and non-fat dry milk for use in infant formula, ice cream, candy and bakery items.
Finding ways to combine proud dairy traditions and modern technology is standard operating procedure for Norager Mejeri A/S. Located between Hobro and Aalborg in Northern Jutland, the Danish company is part of the Nordex Group. The dairy employs 80 people and produces 14,330 tons of feta cheese each year.
Something fishy was going on at Cordova, AK-based Norquest Seafoods, Inc. Production managers were faced with grinders that plugged up and overflowed when handling the remains of the fish products the company processed.
If RFID succeeds at the case level, what can you expect? A lot of data. Besides the IT bandwidth, data storage, data aggregation and processing issues, does this matter? If RFID succeeds, all this data means adequate information management has kicked in. Unfortunately, this will be a problem for manufacturing or processing operations, not just distribution centers.
With efficiency the battle cry of all processing plants, older equipment calls out for a makeover. This was the case with the positive displacement pump-style filler that had been in place on a salad dressing line since 1992 in Johnny's Fine Foods' Tacoma, WA-based plant. "The machine was okay when we installed it, but after years in use, the speed was not up to par and it was becoming increasingly inaccurate," says Henry Gumm, plant manager with Johnny's.
The automotive industry has used electrostatic spraying for decades to magnetically charge paint particles for even coating and minimal paint use. The technology has spread to a variety of other industries, including agricultural applications for the spread of fertilizers and other chemicals. More recently, a systems development company in suburban Chicago deployed a niche application using electrostatic spraying in a commercial bakery and is now exploring broader uses in high-volume food manufacture.
Bag dump stationsConstructed of 304 stainless steel, Airlanco's bag dump stations consist of a large hopper topped by a bar grate and hinged door, an integral pulse jet filtration unit
Does this sound familiar? Rapid change, more complex products, higher volumes and more intense competition. These are the challenges food and beverage processors face today. For some, it can be a web of slow growth, rising costs, waning pricing power, accelerated regulatory and customer requirements, limited sources of raw materials, and a growing percentage of sales from a limited number of powerful and demanding retailers.
When one of Weetabix's private label customers wanted the company to produce sugarcoated flakes, Weetabix decided it was time to enter the world of automation. A multinational company headquartered in the UK, Weetabix manufactures its own brands of cereal (Weetabix and Alpen) and processes recipes for nearly 100 brands of cereals for the Canadian, American and British markets. Specifically, the company wanted to automate its material handling processes at its Cobourg, Ontario plant. The existing method was a laborious process-workers lifted extremely heavy sacks filled with granulated sugar and poured them into a blender.
The appropriateness of carbon monoxide as a component in modified atmosphere packaging (MAP) for meat and seafood became a very public debate in February, pitting a natural-extracts supplier against some of the industry's biggest meatpackers in a match refereed by the Food and Drug Administration.
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