If officials at Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream Inc. and Nestlé SA wanted a symbol of their frozen snacks’ merger, they couldn’t do better than the expanded Dreyer’s plant in Bakersfield, CA. Since 1983, Food Engineering has celebrated outstanding examples of food and beverage facility design and construction from sea to shining sea with the annual Food Plant of the Year award. Nestlé’s Carnation plant in Bakersfield was honored in 1989 (“World’s largest ice-cream plant,” Food Engineering, March 1989).
Vacuum packs play a key role in delivering gourmet frozen meals from Grace's Kitchen Inc., an approach that is helping the Seattle-based firm gain freezer space in some of the fastest growing retail chains nationwide.
The package used by a Park City, UT, bottled water venture will take longer to decompose than the residence time of the liquid in its aquifer, which was carbon dated at roughly 20,000 years. That's not stopping Wasatch IceWater LLC from boasting about the earth-friendly aspects of its flexible pouch.
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.
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.
In food and beverage packaging, function often takes a back seat to form. Take a recent sales promotion at Safeway Inc.'s Dominick's supermarkets in metropolitan Chicago: on one page, the flyer featured a gallon of milk in an unglamorous high-density, polyethylene plastic jug for $2.50, available in chocolate and all fat levels of white. On the next page, a single-serve PET container with one-eighth as much product was promoted for $1. For three days, not seven. In white, only.
The business case for automating plant sanitation has always included soft savings, though the value of extending production runs between sanitation shifts is appreciated by food and beverage processors. But even the soft dollars are acquiring a harder edge as customers and regulators increase pressure for documentation that the soil removal and equipment sterilization steps that are supposed to be done do, in fact, occur.
Arcing and uneven heating are two issues that have limited industrial applications of microwave technology, be it in food or any other manufacturing process. Researchers in Dana Corp.'s Disruptive Technologies Group in Rochester Hills, MI, believe they have overcome those limitations with atmospheric plasma technology-AtmoPlas for short.
The heart-rending story of Christina Desforges was a grim reminder of both the rationale behind the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act (FALCPA) and the challenges faced by processors in helping safeguard consumers with compromised immune systems.