Sponsored by ifm
Food safety is a top priority for manufacturers, but achieving consistent safety and quality across the production process is becoming increasingly complex. Rising regulatory requirements, evolving consumer demands, labor shortages, and the need for real-time traceability have all put pressure on food and beverage manufacturers to adopt more advanced solutions. Automation, particularly through smart sensors and real-time data monitoring, is emerging as a key tool for addressing these challenges.
In this Q&A, John Isabell, Executive Director of Sales – Automotive and Process Market at ifm, discusses how automation technologies are transforming food safety practices. He provides expert insights on how innovations like predictive maintenance, real-time monitoring, and advanced smart sensors can reduce contamination risks, ensure regulatory compliance, and optimize production efficiency. John also shares real-world examples of how ifm’s solutions are helping food manufacturers improve safety protocols, streamline operations, and prepare for the future of food production.
Q: To start us off, what would you say are the most significant food safety challenges manufacturers face today? How do automation solutions address these challenges and reduce contamination risks?
John Isabell: The most significant challenges food manufacturers face today are:
- Cost inflation
- Regulatory compliance and safety
- Technology adoption
- Labor shortages
- Changing consumer preferences
Process automation can help by providing real-time data from more monitoring points in a process. Food and beverage manufacturers can leverage this smarter technology to help workers spend their time on more valuable work than reacting to problems as they occur. This increased access to data helps optimize their processes by enabling greater control, consistency, and safety to consumers and workers.
Q: Can you briefly explain the various types of smart sensors available and how incorporating these sensors into production processes enhances food safety and quality?
John Isabell: In food manufacturing, smart sensors exist on a spectrum of functionality. The basis of smart sensors are those equipped with IO-Link technology, a globally standardized digital communication protocol that is supported by hundreds of automation companies. These sensors send multiple process values from one device over a single wire. The fully digital signal provides greater resolution, increasing the accuracy of detecting small changes in measured values, whether it’s temperature, flow, level, pressure, or others. IO-Link technology is the basis of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) network, because it enables the transfer of machine data to any higher level software system. Manufacturers can still send IO-Link sensor data to PLCs or SCADA systems for machine control, but it also enables data transfer to ERP systems for supply chain optimization or CMMS systems to issue maintenance work orders.
The next level of smart sensors build on the foundation of IO-Link to leverage this previously trapped data and inform onboard algorithms. Sensors with embedded artificial intelligence (AI) provide diagnostic information on the “health” of the sensor and detected anomalies in a process. Not only do these sensors provide greater information, but they can notify a user of seal wear within a valve over time or detect drift between two different temperature sensing methods inside the sensor itself. These are just some examples of how smart sensors are improving food safety beyond just ensuring tighter process controls by proactively alerting operators to issues that might impact food safety or batch quality. With more information and notifications, manufacturers can investigate a potential issue immediately, instead of waiting until the end of a production run. It provides another system of monitoring to catch production issues earlier in the process.
Q: How does real-time monitoring ensure compliance with evolving food safety regulations, including the FDA’s Food Traceability Rule?
John Isabell: Real-time monitoring relies on digital communication and data collection. This underlying technology offers many new opportunities for food and beverage manufacturers to automate data collection and storage, ensuring better compliance without burdensome manual recordkeeping processes. With real-time access to digital sensor data, manufacturers can leverage better process data and combine it with RFID tracking solutions to gain insight into every step of production from raw ingredients to the shipment of final goods.
Automating data collection and storage is especially important for manufacturers to reach compliance with the new FDA Food Traceability Rule. Real-time monitoring solutions facilitate traceability and recall management by providing immediate access to data on the origin, handling, and movement of ingredients throughout production. Records can be automatically stored for compliance-related data, such as environmental conditions, processing times, ingredient sourcing, and more. This simplifies sharing data between manufacturers and regulatory agencies, helping accelerate internal and regulatory audits. Supply chain communication is improved overall with real-time monitoring, allowing suppliers, manufacturers, and retailers to also share safety and traceability data between each other to comply with the new rule.
Q: What role does predictive maintenance play in food safety, and how does technology like ifm’s enable manufacturers to avoid equipment failures that could compromise product safety?
John Isabell: Predictive maintenance plays an important role in food safety by monitoring the health of critical assets. With a predictive maintenance program in place, manufacturers can detect potential catastrophic failures weeks ahead of time and receive early warnings to investigate processes where contaminants might become an issue. For example, wearing feed screws over time could potentially introduce metal contamination if not replaced beforehand. Incomplete cleaning processes pose a threat to food safety as well. Time-based cleaning processes often run longer than necessary to reduce the risk of potential contamination of the next batch by residual cleaning chemicals. Implementing reliable and accurate conductivity sensors within a clean-in-place system helps manufacturers take an instrument-based approach where each phase of the cleaning process is verified by conductivity measurements. This allows food manufacturers to confirm and record that cleaning processes completed fully, often while reducing wasted water consumption that are often the result of time-based processes.
Q: What emerging advancements in automation technology do you see shaping the future of food safety in the food and beverage industry?
John Isabell: Robotics and robotic automation certainly will play an important role in food production of the future. Specifically, collaborative robots, or cobots, and autonomous mobile robotics (AMRs) have significant room for growth and potential to shape the future of food safety. Cobots can take on many of the repetitive, less desirable tasks that have been prone to human error in the past. Already, ifm has seen the growth of AMRs in optimizing logistics within manufacturing facilities and warehouses.
Lastly, advancements in artificial intelligence at the edge and in the cloud will provide even more powerful insight into optimizing quality of batch production. Manufacturers will be able to capture more of their own production data to build better statistical models customized to their recipes and processes. This can result in more immediate action to keep production running optimally with AI operating at the edge. But, more complex analytics will occur in cloud software environments, pushing updates to equipment that bring manufacturers closer to producing a “golden batch” every time.
Q: Aside from food safety, what are some of the other benefits of adopting smart technologies in the food industry?
John Isabell: Aside from enhanced food quality and batch consistency, real-time monitoring of production processes helps identify inefficiencies to address. Manufacturers can reduce water and energy consumption, helping to reduce unnecessary costs and environmental impact. Finally, manufacturers can leverage automation technology to reduce cost and complexity in supply chain and logistics processes.
Q: Can you provide an example or two of how ifm’s automation solutions have helped food and beverage companies optimize their safety protocols?
John Isabell: A great example comes from a project with a large multinational food manufacturer who wanted to reduce human error after an improperly scaled temperature sensor caused an incomplete pasteurization process, resulting in a nationwide recall. They implemented ifm temperature sensors with IO-Link over ethernet IP to the PLC. The ifm solution gave the customer significant advantages that included more reliable signal accuracy, multiple process values over a standard wire, and improved instrument construction that eliminated many environmentally induced causes of temperature sensor drift. By automating the parameterization process, the customer eliminated the risk of mismatched programming causing another issue. For over 5 years later, the ifm solutions have helped them meet stringent quality standards.
Another great example is how our customers have leveraged ifm automation technology to optimize Clean-In-Place (CIP) systems. ifm conductivity sensors have helped customers deploy multiple points of measurement on their CIP system to verify the completion of each process step. Emmi Roth, a dairy processor in Wisconsin, moved from a time-based interval cleaning process to an instrument-based process using ifm solutions. They reduced their annual water consumption by millions of gallons and now have data to confirm the completion of each CIP cycle step before resuming production.
With the newest ifm moneo Cloud software, collecting and analyzing digital sensor data is now even easier. Designed to be as interoperable as possible, moneo software automates data collection from any IO-Link sensor and has helped customers easily access timestamped records of critical cleaning and production processes.
Q: What are the biggest misconceptions food manufacturers have about implementing automation for food safety, and how can these be overcome?
John Isabell: Many food manufacturers believe implementing smart sensors and automation is complicated and expensive. In reality, manufacturers can begin implementation on one machine or process, and scale from there. Many solutions available off-the-shelf today are designed to simplify complex applications and make it a user-friendly experience. If the goal is to implement on a larger scale over time, there are many options for integration and implementation help.
Q: Any final advice for companies considering smart sensors and IIoT technology?
John Isabell: It’s not as complex to get started as it may appear. The best way to approach an IIoT project is to start with a problem you need to solve and investigate smart sensors that might offer a solution. There is a large community of support that has been where you are now, and can help with the journey!
To learn more about the many ways ifm can help future-proof your food processing operations, check out ifm’s food and beverage solutions.
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