Kevin T. Higgins

Mass merchandisers aren’t the only customers putting pressure on suppliers to cut material use and shipping weights.

Functionality issues dogged plant-based plastic resins when they debuted, but product development is gradually overcoming them.

Malt-O-Meal doubled the number of built-this-century US cereal plants when it started production last year in Asheboro, NC, site of its second new facility in six years.

Filtration technology has filled a supporting role in food and beverage production, but multifunction filters are taking a star turn by replacing other technologies in some applications.

Specialized skills are needed to keep machines running, processing areas clean and foreign invaders at bay, but food companies differ on whether these specialists are staff members or vendors’ employees.

Long viewed as a distraction from throughput concerns, energy efficiency and its relation to a product’s carbon footprint are becoming priority concerns for leading food companies.

Hydrodynamic pressure processing got a bad rap for meat tenderizing in the 1990s, but USDA scientists believe there’s still hope for this and other technologies to assist the process.

A decade after a Canadian firm developed a process to recover high-quality protein from a byproduct of vegetable-oil extraction, regulatory obstacles to commercialization have been overcome.

There’s no shortage of packaging equipment innovation, though the gap between technical development and implementation often is measured in decades.

Capital budgets are up, production outlooks are brighter as food industry professionals shift focus toward new opportunities.