Tag Archives: human error

Scott Deakins, Deacom
FST Soapbox

Billions of Dollars Lost to Food Waste, Tech Exists to Reduce It

By Scott Deakins
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Scott Deakins, Deacom

Food waste is a massive global problem led by the United States. According to the USDA, an estimated 30–40% of the country’s food supply ends up in landfills—most of it at the retail and consumer levels. This amounted to approximately 133 billion pounds and $161 billion worth of food wasted in 2010 alone, which prompted the USDA and the Environmental Protection Agency to launch the U.S. Food Loss and Waste 2030 Champions initiative in 2016. Businesses and other organizations can join the ranks as champions by committing to a 50% reduction of food loss and waste by 2030.

That’s a noble goal, but those businesses will only be able to achieve their objective with technologies that reduce food waste in production and the supply chain. Food lost in this medium is hardly insignificant. At least 10%—or billions of pounds of food—is wasted in acts as small as over-ordering or in transport. This is, in short, the result of errors in resource planning.

After an extremely difficult year, food process manufacturers can no longer afford to generate that level of waste. Fortunately, technologies already exist to help the industry regain control of its production, storage and forecasting, and can facilitate leaner businesses and less waste.

Eliminate Human Error and System Inconsistencies

There have been a lot of changes in the way food is grown, harvested, delivered and sold over the last few decades, yet little progress has been made when it comes to unnecessary waste. The Commission for Environmental Cooperation reports that food loss and waste can occur post-harvest due to inaccurate supply and demand forecasting, grade standards for size and quality, and deficiencies in refrigeration. Even the packaging can cause problems if it is inefficient or ineffective.

These and other problems lead to waste—some up front before the product is ever sold to consumers, others down the line after an item has been purchased, leading to a recall. If inventory records are anything less than 100% accurate from formulation through shipment, additional challenges will follow. Though it is not heavily considered in an FDA audit, manufacturers still need the ability to instantaneously report on any aspect of their inventory history, regardless of the ERP software from which data is pulled. ERP systems with bolt-on modules often fail in this regard. If functionalities of the sub-systems are not designed for strict lot tracking, or if those sub-systems are not designed exactly the same, errors are inevitable.

Workarounds can be implemented, but they cannot account for processes that still need to be performed manually, which increases the likelihood that lot tracking accuracy will fall short. Inefficiencies are further exacerbated by sub-systems that handle actions differently, but the challenges don’t end there.

Problems can also develop when data has to be shared across more than one module, database or even system, which may inspire the use of outside solutions, such as an Excel spreadsheet, compounding the issues at hand. Makeshift solutions increase the risk that an incorrect lot number will be entered or that someone will forget to delete a number after a lot was de-issued and re-issued. Any of these cracks in the operational foundation will inevitably deduct from the 100% inventory accuracy that’s necessary for a smooth recall process—anything less will lead to a greater impact on the business.

The only real solution is to eliminate the potential for human error and system inconsistencies altogether—and that can only be accomplished with a configurable ERP solution that handles all business processes from one system and one database and can easily adapt to changing regulation and recipes. Without it, true strict lot control—meaning 100% inventory accuracy with perfect record keeping and the ability to instantly report on any aspect of the inventory history—cannot be achieved.

Reduce Inventory Variance and Grow without Unnecessary Expansions

There are aspects of food waste that can be controlled, including inventory variance, which occurs when items are lost, misplaced or miscounted. This is particularly problematic for packaging and ingredients, causing issues at the production level—finished products cannot be made if there aren’t enough items to complete the process, which is also bad for the bottom line. Inventory variance may occur if deliveries are not verified to confirm that ordered ingredients were actually received or may happen if items are entered incorrectly or simply misidentified.

Variance is more than a nuisance—it can be quite costly. For example, Silver Spring Foods encountered this firsthand when it discovered that its inventory variance commonly reached between $250,000 and $300,000. The company, which debuted in 1929 when founder Ellis Huntsinger started growing horseradish and other vegetable crops, now produces the number-one horseradish retail brand in the United States. With more than 9,000 acres of prime Wisconsin and Minnesota farmland, Silver Spring realized that it had outgrown its outdated ERP solution.

The company initially thought that it had reached capacity and could only grow further by physically expanding its building with an additional manufacturing line that would require new hires to come aboard. In reality, the company needed an ERP solution that could keep up with its impressive level of growth.

More specifically, Silver Spring Foods wanted an ERP system that could tie together several elements, including customer service, accounting, manufacturing, purchasing and shipping within a single tool. The company needed a solution that offered strong data mining and reporting functionality, as well as strong sales reporting, sustainable tech support capabilities and would not exceed ERP budget allocations. It was equally important to have an ERP solution that was configurable without customization, prioritizing speed and efficiency while offering predictable quality and cost of ongoing IT support and maintenance.

After upgrading to a solution that met all of its requirements, Silver Spring Foods was able to gather all data in one system that brought together multiple software integrations, including CRM. This allowed the firm to fine-tune its material purchases to match current production needs, sales forecasts and production schedules. More importantly, inventory variance was reduced to $90,000 during the first year and now falls within a range of just $1,800 to $2,500. By improving inventory management, unearthing new efficiencies and proving that Silver Spring had not yet reached capacity, the company was now able to grow without adding additional square footage.

Don’t Let Waste Cut into Productivity

Food growers, processors and supply chains cannot afford to let waste cut into their productivity or their bottom line. They need to be able to keep track of everything, achieving true strict lot control to limit the damage caused by a recall. They also need to be able to improve food management and reduce inventory variance. These and other advantages can only be attained with the right ERP technology, however, so businesses must choose wisely before making an investment.

Emily Newton, Revolutionized Magazine
FST Soapbox

How Food Processors Can Use Robots to Improve Food Quality

By Emily Newton
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Emily Newton, Revolutionized Magazine

Across industries, new innovations in robotics technologies are helping to speed up day-to-day work and improve product quality. Robots can be especially effective for businesses in the food processing industry, where a growing labor shortage poses trouble for processors.

While a number of critical industry tasks were difficult to fully or partially automate in the past, new robotics technology is helping to increase the number of potential applications for robots in the industry.

Consistency, Accuracy, and Speed

Food processing robots offer a few major advantages over conventional food processing workflows. Robots can perform a task repeatedly over the course of a work day or shift, typically with minimal deviation in precision. Unlike human workers, robots don’t get tired, and their pace of work tends to stay consistent. This combination of accuracy and speed has been found to increase site throughput while ensuring packaged products are up to company standards.

Food processors that adopt robots also see major gains in item consistency—more often, packaged products contain the same amount of food, weigh the same, and are packaged in the same manner.

Automated packaging systems can sometimes be a poor fit for certain food commodities, especially for products like delicate fruits and vegetables.

Experimentation, however, often leads to custom solutions that can handle these unique challenges. After experimentation with new weighing and packaging robots in the cannabis industry, for example, processors were able to accelerate the packaging process and create more consistently packaged items.

In the food processing industry, this can come in the form of robots with soft silicon grippers and attachments, which help companies package delicate products.

Workers production line
Workers in a factory sorting food by hand, could be assisted by new robot technology. (Unsplash image)

Preventing Cross Contamination

Despite improved food safety standards, foodborne disease outbreaks remain common in the United States.

The use of robots can help control cross-contamination in food processing plants.

With any human labor force comes the risk of cross-contamination. Workers assigned to packaging foods can easily transport pathogens from product to product or from one area of the facility to another. This is especially true in sites that process raw meat products. Even when following proper site hygiene practices, it’s possible for workers to unintentionally transport pathogens and other contaminants from one workcell to another.

Because work in food processing facilities is often shoulder-to-shoulder, it’s also easy for contaminants to spread from one worker to another once a particular cell has been contaminated.

Robots that are fixed in place and handle all the aspects of a particular packaging job can help localize potential contamination, making it easier for processors to minimize cross-contamination and keep food safe.

Robots can still contribute to cross contamination if not properly cleaned, but an additional set of robots could solve this problem, too. For example, one a provider of robots for the food processing industry has developed a set of robots capable of washing down an entire workcell.

These robots, working in pairs, activate at the end of each operating cycle and use high-powered jets of water to wash down the workcell, the packaging robots used there, and themselves.

Collaborative Robotics (Cobots)

One major recent innovation in robots has a new focus on tech that is collaborative.

These new robots, unlike conventional robotics, aren’t always built to fully automate a particular task. Instead, they are built to interact and work collaboratively alongside humans where necessary.

Artificial intelligence-based machine vision technology helps them navigate factory floors safely or assist in tasks like assembly and machine tending. Safety features like force limiters and padded joints help prevent injuries that can occur while working in close proximity to conventional robots.

These features also enable them to work in tight spaces without the use of safety cages that conventional robots sometimes require. In factories and food processing plants, they can provide assistance and speed up existing workflows.

For example, an article in Asia Pacific Food Industry cites one case study from a Swedish food processor, Orkla Foods. The company integrated cobots into a production line packaging vanilla cream, freeing up the human workers who had been responsible for the task. Before the cobots were introduced, workers had to bag and manually pack the vanilla cream into cartons.

Even with cobots, human workers are still necessary for tasks that require judgment, creativity, and problem-solving skills. Cobots can take over tasks that don’t lend themselves well to automation. These tasks tend to be tedious, dull, or even dangerous due to the repetitive motions workers need to make.

Even if a task can’t be fully automated, cobots can still help improve efficiency and boost accuracy. These robots provide the most significant benefits for businesses that need flexibility and agility in production.

Cobots are often lightweight and easy to reprogram on-the-fly, allowing workers to quickly move them from task to task as needed. In many cases, an entire fleet of cobots can be repositioned and reprogrammed in half a day, allowing a business to reconfigure its robots to handle entirely new tasks without additional capital investment.

This flexibility can also make cobots a better fit for personalized products than other systems. As product specifications change, a cobot can be easily programmed and reprogrammed to handle the differences.

The use of these robots can also help prevent cross contamination, like more conventional robotics.

Sector-Specific Applications

A handful of sectors within the food processing industry can also benefit from niche robotics designed to automate certain specific tasks.

Danish robotics manufacturer Varo, for example, developed a line of cake decorating and filling robots. These robots are designed with technology that allows them to determine which cake will be decorated next, minimizing the amount of human involvement needed to operate.

While these robots won’t be useful for every manufacturer, they are a good example of how many sectors within the industry stand to benefit from robots that can automate niche tasks.
Using Food Processing Robots to Improve Product Quality and Consistency
Robots help automate tasks that are dull, dirty or dangerous. In doing so, they typically provide businesses with significant upgrades to process accuracy, speed, and consistency.

New technology—like machine vision and collaborative robotics technology—is helping to expand the use cases of robots in the food processing industry. These robots can often improve product quality more effectively than process changes alone, and may help manage a labor gap that could persist well into the future.

Roelof Koopmans, Semtech
Retail Food Safety Forum

How Technology Simplifies Food Safety Operations

By Roelof Koopmans
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Roelof Koopmans, Semtech

To get to the restaurant table, food must travel great lengths to preserve that farm fresh quality and in many cases, IoT-enabled sensors are being used to do this. This is especially important as the World Health Organization estimates that one in 10 people fall ill every year from eating contaminated food.

When we think of our favorite dish, we often associate it with delicious flavors, pleasant scents and even memories of a night out with friends. What we likely don’t consider is technology, something that’s critical in ensuring the meal on our plate is safe to consume. Technology plays an essential role in guaranteeing that restaurants are serving fresh food to customers. From identifying operational deficiencies to protecting the overall brand of an organization, there are certain measures restaurants are taking—whether local or country-wide chains—to ensure food quality remains a top priority.

Restaurants are perhaps held to an even higher standard than your local supermarket when it comes to the quality of food on the table. Therefore, it’s imperative that perishables are cared for properly throughout the entirety of the food supply chain and that starts well before the food ever enters the restaurant’s front door. With long-range, low-power wireless IoT technology, farmers can get insights into a number of variables that may impact the growth of their crops. Armed with that knowledge, they can make real-time decisions to optimize crop growth and ultimately produce a greater yield. For example, farmers today can set up a series of sensors throughout their farm to measure real-time soil conditions, including humidity and pH levels. If they notice an especially high pH, for example, they can immediately remedy the situation and provide the crop with the proper nutrients or conditions it needs to grow.

For food safely to arrive at restaurants, it must be kept in a controlled environment during its journey from the farm or warehouse, and carefully monitored during that time. The temperature of refrigerated shipping units or storage facilities is an incredibly important factor, as bacteria growth can increase even by simply opening the refrigerator door or with a slight temperature shift, and employees are often tasked with managing this. With large facilities comes increased labor for employees, which can lead to inefficient temperature monitoring. To eliminate food waste and contamination, IoT sensors deployed throughout facilities can eliminate human error, and deliver more consistent monitoring, via real-time updates when temperatures enter unsafe territories.

Numerous international food handling and food safety laws have been implemented to reduce the risk of foodborne illness resulting from bacterial growth. A major component of most “farm-to-fork” regulations is the ability to track, report and maintain appropriate temperature conditions inside refrigeration and freezer units throughout the entire cold chain—including when the food finally makes it the restaurant.

This is a universal priority for restaurants around the world, including Hattie B’s Hot Chicken, a southern-style food chain, which started in Nashville and now has locations nationwide. To successfully do this, the restaurant turned to technology. They used a supplier of wireless connectivity solutions with integrated long range, low power technology for temperature monitoring sensors. The sensors, which are capable of penetrating stainless steel doors and concrete walls, can monitor temperatures in refrigerators and freezers. This is essential, as the technology eliminates possible human error in manually checking temps and other food safety procedures. In instances where refrigerator temperatures shift out of range, the technology remotely notifies restaurant managers in real-time, allowing them to act quickly, ensuring their perishables remain fresh and safe for customers at all times.

Food waste in restaurants is closely tied to food safety. In the United States alone, food waste is estimated to be between 30–40% of the food supply, according to the USDA. In the restaurant industry in particular, human error is one of the most notable reasons for food waste. To eliminate the human error when handling food and monitoring storage, an IoT solution provider for the industrial, smart city and smart energy segments, integrated long-range low power technology into smart refrigeration solutions for restaurant applications. This IoT solution is designed for humidity and temperature monitoring, delivering real-time updates to managers to ensure the shelf life of food is maximized and it remains safe to consume, ultimately leading to a decrease in food waste.

From farm to table, technology plays an essential role in ensuring restaurants are delivering the highest quality of fresh, safe food. It allows organizations to identify operational deficiencies and reduce overall food safety risk, which is imperative when maintaining a strong business in a competitive industry.