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.
Not all refrigerated food and beverage warehouses have the luxury of being located away from people in wide-open spaces next to an interstate and a railroad spur.
Depending on the application and the country, design rules and standards can vary, causing headaches for machine builders as they try to make designs more universal.
The recent ARC Industry Forum, held in Orlando FL, described an “industrial Internet of Things” (IoT) as being close at hand. In fact, many of the technologies are already here, but some still need work to provide the services and security industrial operations need.
You can send incoming raw material samples out to a third-party lab, but plenty of easy-to-use, rapid test kits can more quickly provide the results you need—right at your own facility.
A June 10, 2011 report on Deutsche Welle states “bean sprouts are the likely source of an E. coli outbreak in Germany that has killed 31 people and made nearly 3,000 ill since May [2011].” This information was attributed to Reinhard Burger, president of Germany’s federal infectious disease laboratory, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI).
You may be able to use a spreadsheet or home accounting program to get your household finances in order. But, there are so many places for cash to evaporate in a food or beverage plant, that unless you are using an integrated software system to track and focus every process, you may never know if leaks exist.
Whether you’re a small, medium or large food and beverage manufacturer, taking the plunge and opening a new plant in a foreign country is a huge decision, often fraught with risks you may have never envisioned. But there are alternatives, and finding the one that makes sense for your operation can help propel your products into the global marketplace.
While FSMA sections on the Produce Safety Rule and Hazard Analysis and Risk-Based Preventive Controls for Human Food Rule have garnered the lion’s share of the news in the last few months, the Proposed Rule on Focused Mitigation Strategies to Protect Food Against Intentional Adulteration is out for comment until the end of March. Though no large-scale events have occurred, a few small ones have affected small groups of people for various, unrelated reasons.