Today, costly food recalls, foodborne illness outbreaks, and compliance with new regulatory requirements are a few factors driving innovation in the food and beverage industry. You can also add the never-ending need for greater productivity, lower operating costs, and rising consumer expectations to the list of reasons food and beverage manufacturers are searching for new approaches that improve food safety and deliver greater speed, efficiency and quality control.
The innovative technologies food and beverage manufacturers are adopting include fixed industrial scanners and machine vision cameras. These Automatic Identification and Data Capture (AIDC) technologies have emerged as critical tools in every manufacturing process, enabling automated track-and-trace and quality inspection workflows throughout production to ensure only the highest quality products reach consumers.
Historically, when people think of machine vision technologies, they tend to assume the systems are hyper-complex and require advanced technical capabilities to deploy and operate. Only part of that presumption is accurate, however. While machine vision tools are highly innovative and often use complex machine learning systems, real-world applications are accessible to just about any manufacturer.
As an analogy, consider the imaging capabilities of any halfway-decent smartphone: The mobile device you probably have in your pocket right now includes a wide range of advanced image processing capabilities that would have required workstation-level image processing tools and the skills of a trained professional photographer not long ago. Today, you capture those images with no thought at all.
The latest fixed scanning and machine vision tools aren’t quite as accessible, but they’re close. In fact, Zebra Technologies offers a portfolio of fixed scanners and smart cameras that run on a simple, easy-to-master software platform (Zebra Aurora) that allows anyone to quickly create and deploy powerful data- and image-capture solutions for manufacturing applications.
So, while many food production plants still rely on error-prone, time-consuming manual data collection and inspection processes, there is an easy path to automation systems that support the fastest food and beverage production lines.
Here’s a brief look at several typical workflows:
These are just a few examples of how food and beverage manufacturers use Zebra’s easy-to-deploy fixed scanning and machine vision tools to automate their operations. Fortunately, with Zebra’s automation portfolio, you don’t need to tackle all of them at once. You can start with tools that allow you to automate simple 1D or 2D barcode scanning, then scale your system with simple software upgrades as your needs and goals evolve—without needing to invest in new hardware.
At Zebra, they're committed to empowering teams with the mobility and insight to deliver at the cutting edge of excellence. More than just providing intelligent hardware, they offer solutions that give organizations complete visibility to make smart, nimble decisions about what action to take now, and how to plan for tomorrow.