Innovation | Food Engineering

Fabulous Food Plants

Clif Bar’s visual bakery project has the company ahead of the game

June 30, 2020

Clif Bar's Twin Falls bakery was named Food Engineering’s Sustainable Plant of the Year in 2017. The Indianapolis bakery has a different—although equally successful—story to tell.

Green Plant Design

Diageo aims to go carbon-free with new whiskey distillery

Gray is partnering with the spirits industry giant on the project using electrified boilers

Rose Shilling

June 29, 2020

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Diageo will try to make its new Bulleit whiskey distillery in Kentucky carbon neutral, electrifying the boilers with renewable power as a step toward the company’s climate change goals.

IT systems and COVID-19

Quality management software supplier updates IT system just in time for COVID-19

When a series of power outages caused systemic IT failure, moving to the cloud provided a solution and let the staff work from home or anywhere

Wayne Labs

June 23, 2020

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While it’s often been said that the shoemaker has no shoes for his own children, sometimes a similar thing can happen with a software company. Only in this case, InfinityQS, a supplier of data-driven enterprise quality management software, had an aging on-premises IT system, all crammed in together in the traditional “server room.”

Flexible Pouches

2 peanut butter brands try to lessen the mess with new packages

Jif, Skippy add squeeze pouches

Rose Shilling

June 11, 2020

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Two peanut butter brands are adding squeeze pouches to their product lineups, using flexible packaging to appeal to people who don't like getting the spread on their hand when they scrape the last bits out of the jar.

Food processors take advantage of AI for proactive maintenance

From reactive to preventive to predictive to prescriptive, maintenance in food and beverage processing plants has come a long way

Sharon Spielman

June 8, 2020

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Big data and deep learning make artificial intelligence useful to understanding data, making predictions and suggesting recommended actions without explicit human instructions.

How processors can use digital tools to adapt to COVID-19

June 5, 2020

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Food Engineering Editor-in-Chief Casey Laughman and RizePoint CEO Dean Wiltse discuss the digital tools available for processors during the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19

Coca-Cola bottlers produce millions of COVID-19 test tubes

Plastic preforms used for bottles are just the right shape for test kit swabs

Rose Shilling

June 1, 2020

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A federal lab helping scale up production of COVID-19 test tubes found a solution in the beverage industry: the plastic used for Coca-Cola bottles.

Pet Food

Packaging trends in pet food production

Packaging is king in the growing market for premium dog and cat food

Rose Shilling

May 28, 2020

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Packaging has a key role in the pet food industry’s robust growth, helping showcase quality, safety and sustainability, especially for premium products.

Garrison Brothers master distiller Donnis Todd

Field Reports

Artisanal bourbon distillery supports its growth with top quality grain handling system

May 28, 2020

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In 2018, Garrison Brothers contacted Coperion K-Tron’s local representative and resident grain handling expert, Shamrock Systems Inc., to help upgrade its current grain handling system. The system experts at Coperion K-Tron to help design a completely automated system that would enable Garrison Brothers to quadruple its production.