Wayne Labs has more than 30 years of editorial experience in industrial automation. He served as senior technical editor for I&CS/Control Solutions magazine for 18 years where he covered software, control system hardware and sensors/transmitters. Labs ran his own consulting business and contributed feature articles to Electronic Design, Control, Control Design, Industrial Networking and Food Engineering magazines. Before joining Food Engineering, he served as a senior technical editor for Omega Engineering Inc. Labs also worked in wireless systems and served as a field engineer for GE’s Mobile Communications Division and as a systems engineer for Bucks County Emergency Services. In addition to writing technical feature articles, Wayne covers FE’s Engineering R&D section.
Because of increasing consumer interest in a more diverse product selection, healthy foods, and more convenient meal preparation, food manufacturers in dairy, meat, baked goods and produce are supplying a widening array of new SKUs in both chilled and frozen formats. This places an ever increasing demand on cold storage, and with older facilities, it’s not very easy to automate them.
Seven suppliers from mechanical engineering, industrial automation and software announced the foundation of the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance at the Hannover Messe 2019 trade fair. With this cooperation, the companies want to overcome proprietary solutions and give a boost to the digital transformation of the European industry.
Recognizing the need to provide a cordset and connectors to meet food and beverage industry standards, Molex redesigned a connector family to provide the industry with a solution.
FDA has taken another look at food labeling with two recent draft guidance documents, the first regarding serving sizes and dual-column labels and the second on nutritional information pertaining to added sugars, vitamins and minerals.
The digitalization journey for food and beverage processors relies on careful consideration of numerous factors to be a success. Among them are sensors to collect data, applications to manage that data, and cloud-based systems to help oversee the entire process.
If you're not embarking on the digital transformation journey, you'll be flying blind without the instrumentation and computing capabilities to keep you focused on producing quality, food-safe product and staying ahead of your competition.
It’s ironic that the Jeff Bezos, Amazon chief executive, who heads up one of the most cyber-secure cloud architectures in the world, had his own very private data hacked and used against him. But his sloppiness about personal security provides a warning message for us all. That is, we can build the most secure, impossible-to-hack network systems, but they can’t protect us from our own stupidity—sharing very personal data over systems that aren’t so private.
In food manufacturing, one of the most important challenges is ensuring complete hygiene at all steps in the process. For Minebea Intec, the subject of hygienic design has been the top priority for many years, a fact that continues to be apparent in the new systems introduced by the company.