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As Koch Foods evaluated its endpoint strategy, it faced a familiar issue for many manufacturers: how to modernize IT infrastructure without increasing operational complexity or sacrificing reliability.

This visual overview, featuring images and videos of robotics applications in the food industry, illustrates what is possible with modern vision systems, artificial intelligence and robotics in a range of applications — from agricultural harvesting to serving up RTE meals, smart palletization and carcass cutting.

The world of smart packaging comprises many parts — intelligent equipment, recyclable materials, captivating art and lots of data — but pulling it together is a challenge. However, if done correctly, it benefits everyone in the supply chain from producer to consumer with timely information.

McCain says the program gives its teams and potato growers a shared, consistent view of crop performance throughout the season, using data-driven insights to help identify variability earlier and prioritize attention where it matters most.

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.

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.

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.

Food and beverage plants often face hidden losses marked by discrepancies in yield, giveaway, and mass balance. While OEE measures capacity usage, it doesn’t provide insights into product quantity or waste, which can be revealed by analyzing quality data effectively.

Ever notice how ChatGPT or CoPilot saves all your AI chats? While this can help solve future problems more quickly, private data accumulated from an OT system saved on the public internet is a disaster waiting to happen. Fortunately, in most cases AI is embedded in the process and data stays private and protected.

In an era where visibility and agility are becoming more essential, many food and beverage manufacturers are moving toward enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions that help create a single system of record.