Be it ever so humble, overall equipment efficiency is the focus of a growing number of plant automation projects, adding another component to the continuous improvement tool kit.

As many of you who read this column each month are well aware, Food Engineering’s Food Automation & Manufacturing Conference and Expo is held every year in Florida during April.

The combination of membrane bioreactor filtration with a zoned anaerobic digester resulted in unprecedented COD reductions in a cheese plant’s high-strength effluent.

General Mills has expanded its Worldwide Innovation Network (G-WIN) open innovation program to include digital marketing.

Over the past few months, we’ve been actively working to provide our readers with a much more  compelling and interactive online experience.

Deliberate acts of sabotage can be more difficult to detect and prevent than bacterial threats to food. Food manufacturers now are bolstering their defenses against security threats.

The power of magnetic waves is evident to any Boy Scout with a compass. A Dutch firm is applying amplified magnetic force to the task of peeling an onion

As manufacturers increase connectivity between plant floor and enterprise systems to boost productivity and reduce time to market, this interconnectivity can also bring undesirable security risks. ODVA (Open Device-Net Vendors Association) released a document that provides guidelines on how to minimize these risks.

Mastery of the supply chain can yield tremendous cost savings for food companies, but only if production is aligned with what will sell in the months ahead.

Teaching packaging machines to communicate. Thanks to open standards, packaging machine controls communicate up and down the line and with MES and ERP systems to provide key performance data.