Addressing industry trends and preparing your facility for the future is key to success. Click to learn how to solve food processing challenges with automation.
With robust demand and strong price support, it’s a good time to be in the food processing industry, which has shown strong resilience to recent economic uncertainty.
But this success adds pressure at the plant level. Operations are being asked to produce even more, more efficiently and more profitably—often while fighting labor availability issues.
The solution is to automate production lines more. Processing equipment, food-handling robotics, and data collection and analyzing tools allow operations to exploit demand and capture profits.
This article explores five reasons for implementing automation and three case studies with Grote’s automation solutions.
THE STATE OF FOOD PROCESSING & DEMAND
Inflation may be cooling off, but higher food prices are now “baked in,” with many popular foods significantly more expensive than just a year or two ago. That’s left food processors worried about a fall in demand for their products.
However, the opposite appears to be true. Although grocery prices continue to rise, restaurant prices have risen five times faster. In response, consumers are abandoning eating out and opting for more meals at home, driving demand for frozen prepared food. In fact, the market for frozen pizza is now projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 6.9% between 2023 and 2030.
Food processors are in a strong position. As producers of the foods American families rely on week in and week out, they can expect demand to remain strong through good times and bad.
As Bob Grote, CEO of processing equipment manufacturer Grote Company, notes: “Are there trends in the food industry that processors need to be aware of? Absolutely. But we can count on the fact that people will always spend money on food. That won’t change, regardless of the economic factors at play.”
That does not mean processors can afford to be complacent. Now is the time to ensure your company can continue increasing production to meet demand and bed down profitability by investing in flexibility and efficiency.
How will your company handle shifts in consumer taste or increases in the cost of key ingredients? Investing in automated systems that promise to improve integration while establishing agility and predictability across your line is the answer.
Below, we consider some of the general benefits of increasing automation in your food processing operations and some of the specific challenges automation can help solve.
GENERAL BENEFITS OF AUTOMATION IN FOOD PROCESSING
How can food processors address long-term trends like supply chain uncertainty, rising wholesale prices, and a shrinking labor supply? In many cases, the answer is increased automation of their critical production processes.
Increased automation of food processing operations has been shown to:
- Improve efficiency by optimizing raw material use, integrating with other systems, and minimizing line disruptions and downtime.
- Reduce labor costs by automating repetitive tasks, enhancing overall productivity, and minimizing maintenance time.
- Minimize manual handling, allowing you to improve accuracy, consistency, and safety while reducing your labor bill.
- Optimize performance with innovations like data analytics, robotics, and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). These advances allow real-time monitoring of operations and data-driven management decisions.
- Increase product diversity. Automated equipment can be designed to handle two or more products, giving you the flexibility to diversify your product line without needing to run multiple processing lines.
Let’s take a closer look at how process automation achieves these goals by addressing specific production challenges.
FOOD PROCESSING CHALLENGES SOLVED BY AUTOMATION
How can food processors address long-term trends like supply chain uncertainty, rising wholesale prices, and a shrinking labor supply? In many cases, the answer is increased automation of their critical production processes.
1. Higher Production Volumes
Can you keep up with the increasing demand for your products? Automated systems can boost throughput and standardize production rates. This increases reliability and predictability in production, no matter what you produce.
With consumers turning to off-the-shelf and prepared foods, now is a good time to get ahead of the demand by making a smart investment in automated equipment.
2. Manual Labor Availability
Finding it harder to keep your lines staffed? Fewer young people are entering the food processing industry, and existing skilled workers are retiring, resulting in a long-term structural labor shortage.
Automated or fully robotic systems can now produce most line tasks accurately and quickly, surpassing even the most skilled workers. By automating the most repetitive and labor-intensive tasks, you can reduce the risk of being caught short-handed and offer those entering the field access to more appealing, higher-value work, improving retention over time.
3. Production Efficiency
Are production inefficiencies preventing your company from reaching critical targets? Incremental changes to your existing equipment are unlikely to do the trick. It might be time to focus on integrating complete processing lines tied together with controls, further automating with robotics, and simplifying operations and maintenance where possible.
Automated systems streamline food processing, speeding up production while minimizing errors, leading to consistent, repeatable output. That means increased output from the same resources, which improves margins.
4. Product Yield & Waste
Excess food or inaccurate application cuts into margins and can sometimes be the difference between profit and loss on a SKU. Automation reduces waste by delivering precise placement and portioning of your product and accurate ingredient application during production.
In some cases, excess product or spillage can be collected and returned to the system, saving you tens of thousands of dollars a year on expensive ingredients.
5. Consistent Food Quality
Customers come back for your product because they know what to expect. Automated systems perform repetitive tasks precisely every time, delivering uniformity and consistent quality. Not only is your end product better, but you also save time and labor in quality checks and batch reworks.
By contrast, manual labor is more expensive, and both consistency and quality can suffer if workers are tired, distracted, or have insufficient training or experience.
REAL-WORLD FOOD PROCESSING AUTOMATION IN ACTION
Now, let’s explore how the automation of food processing operations looks in practice through three case studies. In each, we’ll detail how Grote automated food processing solutions solve specific production challenges.
1. Case Study: Sandwich Assembly
Challenge: Manual sandwich assembly usually needs many people on the line. Production is capped because space is limited, and there is a limit to the number of operations each worker can handle. In addition, most sandwich manufacturers make a variety of sandwiches throughout each shift/week, so ingredients and recipes change.
Recommended Grote Machinery: Grote’s turnkey sandwich assembly line includes bread feeders, depositors, slicers, cutters, conveyors, and more.
Solution: Grote’s sandwich assembly equipment is designed to work together and run at the same rate (typically 60 items per minute per lane) for consistent production. Lines can be integrated with robotics to perform every operation from positioning to final packaging.
Portioning and placement are also more consistent, from condiments and salads to slicing and applying meat and cheese. Robotics assist with the handling of ingredients and sandwiches during production.
2. Case Study: Pizza Production
Challenge: Toppings need to be applied quickly and accurately in high-volume operations. Topping pizzas manually is extremely time-consuming, inconsistent, and wasteful. Achieving consistent weights and accurate placement of sauce, cheese, and pepperoni is extremely hard.
Toppings like sausage, pepperoni, and cheese are more expensive, so accurate application and minimal waste or spillage are imperative. The frozen pizza market is highly competitive, so product quality needs to be high.
Recommended Grote Machinery: Sauce applicator, topping applicator, pepperoni slicers
Solution:
Automation dramatically increases production, improves quality, and reduces waste by depositing sauce accurately, adding toppings consistently, and carefully controlling the slicing of pepperoni.
For example, Grote’s Waterfall Applicator includes weigh cells to ensure accurate topping weights and consistent application and return belts to recycle unused cheese/toppings.
3. Case Study: Prepared Food Production
Challenge: Producers want to produce various products and respond to consumer or competitor demands efficiently without line reconfiguration or adjustment and without significant capital expenditure on new equipment.
Recommended Grote Machinery: Slicers, depositors
Solution: Traditionally, offering new lines or an expanded variety of products requires new processing equipment, working with a co-manufacturer, or bringing in more manual labor. While changing packaging equipment every 3-5 years is common, it’s less common (and more expensive) to change out processing equipment at these intervals.
Grote’s flexible automated processing equipment handles many ingredients and makes a wide range of products, so you get more long-term value from your capital investment. For example, Grote slicers can be configured to easily switch slicing between meat, cheese, bread, and produce, then apply sliced food to a range of different trays and food bases.
GROTE COMPANY: YOUR FOOD PROCESSING AUTOMATION PARTNER
Grote Company has been a leading supplier of quality automation equipment to the food processing industry, including frozen pizza, sandwich, and prepared food markets, for over 50 years. In that time, we’ve built up a wealth of experience in integrating new technology into complex food processing applications.
We deliver immediate benefits and long-term savings by helping industrial food processors automate their processes using robotics, advanced data analytics, and good, old-fashioned engineering know-how.
Our team can guide you toward reducing costs, increasing margins, and leveling up your production by installing machinery from our automated slicers, applicators, and depositors.
Click below to begin exploring our food assembly automation solutions.
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