Improving Food Processing Efficiency with Automation

With soaring demand, hyper-competitive markets, and rising costs, engineers and plant managers everywhere know the winners will be those who can turn maximum efficiency into a critical competitive edge.

In food processing, efficiency boils down to speeding up production, cutting waste, and delivering the same high quality in every batch, day in and day out. That means eliminating bottlenecks and optimizing processing from receiving to the loading dock.

Today, process automation is transforming our industry by doing just that. In this article, we take an in-depth look at the specific ways that advanced automation technology is changing the shop floor and helping to drive ever-higher levels of efficiency. Read on to learn more.

Delivering Processing Efficiency Through Automation

Efficiency is all about maximizing output while minimizing wasted time, ingredients, and labor. Automation helps achieve greater processing efficiency in two key ways:

• Doing things faster, allowing you to produce more product per shift.
• Doing things better, with improved accuracy, precision, and uniformity, so that you can minimize waste while maintaining product quality and production rates.

With the right automation equipment, your lines can handle larger volumes while maintaining consistency and minimizing waste. Dedicated food processing lines can feature up to three layers of automation with increasing levels of efficiency:

1. Free-standing automated equipment like slicers, depositors, and topping applicators take high-speed, repetitive tasks and precisely execute them all shift long. This allows you to meet demand, improve consistency, and free up labor for other roles.
2. Integrated systems feature fully connected processes and centralized line controls, allowing you to free up staff from tedious transfer and repositioning tasks.
3. Fully robotic systems take automation to the next level, working closely with your integrated process systems to transfer, position, and place products quickly and accurately in applications that would previously have required manual handling by staff.

At each stage, increased automation allows faster throughput, increased accuracy and consistency, and improved sanitation.

How Food Processing Automation Drives Efficiency

Now, let’s look at some of the more specific ways that increased automation drives efficiency in food processing.

1. Increasing Production Speed

Individual automated machines handle ingredients and products at speeds much faster than manual processing. Integrated lines with controls allow producers to scale up production even more without a proportional increase in labor.

Precise, high-speed automated equipment like slicers, topping or sauce applicators, and depositors are changing how quickly work gets done on the production floor. Here’s how these machines are redefining food processing efficiency:

Slicers: Automated slicers keep your line moving by delivering consistent, precise slices of foods like pepperoni and cheese all shift long while reducing the need for manual handling. Grote’s slicers further automate food preparation by slicing products and applying them directly onto food bases, trays, and racks. 

Topping/Sauce Applicators: Automated topping and sauce applicators provide fast, accurate application of ingredients like cheese or pizza sauce every time, eliminating the need for time-consuming application and spreading by manual operators.

Depositors: Ideal for liquid and particulate ingredients, automated depositors allow quick, precise placement with minimal waste. Depositors are particularly valuable in high-volume sandwich production, helping you reach daily quotas without sacrificing quality.

2. Reducing Downtime

There’s more to processing efficiency than just speed. Well-designed and properly installed equipment should also reduce your daily setup and cleaning times, so your line spends more time running.

Equipment from top manufacturers like Grote comes with features like sanitary design and easily accessible parts to streamline transitions between product runs and speed up regular maintenance.  This allows for faster, more thorough cleanings to minimize downtime and ensure your lines spend more time running at total capacity.

More advanced automation equipment also comes with data monitoring capabilities that deliver on-the-fly insights into a line’s performance. By tracking key metrics, manufacturers can pinpoint underperformance, predict maintenance needs, and catch potential problems early. This helps minimize production disruption and keep lines running at capacity for longer.

3. Improving Product Uniformity & Reducing Waste

Automated equipment helps deliver precise ingredient portions, ensuring every product that comes off the line meets the same high standards, even as throughput increases. By measuring and dispensing ingredients with accuracy and consistency, automated systems help to control costs by reducing spillage and waste.

Accurate portioning also means greater product consistency. That consistency makes it easier to meet customer expectations for quality every time, driving brand loyalty and repeat business, even as your production increases.

4. Scaling Operations with Automation

Automation makes it easier to scale production from a single process to multiple lines. That makes it possible to increase throughput and improve product quality without a proportional increase in labor costs.

By adding automation in stages, you can grow capacity at your own pace, starting with individual systems and building toward end-to-end solutions that streamline the entire workflow from receiving to packaging.

Grote recognizes four clear steps on the road from single-application automation to multi-line integration. These are illustrated below.

Four Stages of Food Process Automation*
1.	Manual to limited equipment	Improves efficiency and increases capacity at an individual step or process only.
2.		Limited equipment to fully integrated line	Streamlines all processes and scales throughput up to the line limits.
3.			Single lane/line to multiple lanes/lines	Scales line to highest possible throughput.
4.	Incremental efficiency gains at remaining manual points. Allows operators to plan better.			Equipment, robotics, and data monitoring
*© Grote Company 2024

Food Process Automation in Action

Now, let’s look at examples of how automation using Grote machinery drives efficiency in food processing.

1. Pizza Production

Grote machine(s): Sauce applicator, topping applicator, pizza slicer.

How it improves efficiency through automation: Manually topping pizzas is time-consuming, inconsistent, and wasteful, and it requires a lot of labor for larger operations. Automation dramatically increases production rates, improves accuracy and quality, and ensures less waste through accurate sauce depositing, consistent toppings, and the ability to slice and apply pizza in full patterns.

When fully integrated, our pizza topping line can produce more than 45 pizzas per minute per lane. You can configure any sauce depositor, topping depositor, and pepperoni slicer to work together. It offers simple recipe changeouts so you can easily produce different types and sizes of pizza on the same line.

We also offer models that scale up to multiple lanes for high-volume operations.

2. Sandwich Assembly

Grote machine(s): Entire sandwich production line with robotics

How it improves efficiency through automation: This equipment line integrated with robotics can almost completely replace manual labor and dramatically increase production. It automates almost all the applications in making a sandwich up to the final packaging.

The line is fully integrated and runs at the same rate (60/min/lane) throughout to ensure consistent production. All portions are consistent, from condiments and salads to the slicing and application of meat and cheese. Our hygienic robotics units are designed to handle ingredients and completed sandwiches to prepare them for the next step.

The sandwich depositors, slicers, cutters, and robotics all have built-in flexibility to process multiple recipes and products, so manufacturers can easily change out ingredients and process products on the same line with minimal downtime. All equipment is also designed for maximum hygiene to streamline sanitation and allow thorough cleaning and validation between runs.

Read More: 5 Considerations for Adding Robotics to a Sandwich Assembly Line

3. Prepared Food Production

Grote machine(s): Varies widely based on the application

How it improves efficiency through automation: Automation improves efficiency and boosts ROI by increasing overall throughput and improving the accuracy of slicing, spreading, and food application to ensure consistency and minimize waste. Here’s how that works with three common types of prepared foods.

Meals: Prepared meals include sandwiches, salads, frozen and ready meals. Our automated slicers slice and apply ingredients directly into trays and food bases, providing consistent and accurate slice thickness and placement, which improves quality and reduces waste.

Most slicers are cantilevered so they can be moved on or off the line for production flexibility and ease of sanitation. They can also be reconfigured to change ingredients, reducing downtime between SKUs.

Integrated depositors apply sauces, condiments, salads, and other ingredients with accurate placement. Units are designed to handle flexible ingredients and different deposit weights and can be moved on or off the line for sanitation.

Snacks: Many of our slicers are designed to slice food into snacks. These machines scale from offline slicing to high-volume, multi-lane bulk slicing. Our inline slicers integrate with the processes before and after, such as chillers, ovens, or fryers, by slicing product directly onto the required trays and screens, streamlining production and increasing throughput.

Examples of sliced snacks include:

• Meat and vegan substitutes for jerky and other meat snacks
• Bread chips, crisps, melba toast, and other baked snacks
• Dehydrated or dried citrus slices used in snacks, drink garnishes, gift boxes, and more

Our specialized Waterfall Applicator applies shredded or grated cheese onto baking trays to go directly to the oven. The integrated brush cleans off excess which is recirculated back into the system to eliminate waste.

Grote: Your End-to-End Food Automation Supplier

Looking to build efficiency and scalability into your food processing application? Automation equipment should be at least part of your solution. Today’s automated food processing units work alone or together to increase production, ensure consistency, eliminate waste, and reduce expensive downtime.

Whether aiming to automate a single time-consuming process, connect everything on your line into a fully integrated operation, or harness the power of advanced robotics to streamline production and guarantee quality, investing in high-quality automation equipment will boost your bottom line today and position you for expansion tomorrow.

At Grote Company, we’ve been a leading supplier of powerful, durable food production equipment for more than 50 years. Our equipment is trusted in food-processing plants worldwide to deliver speed, capacity, longevity, safety, and efficiency.

Interested to know exactly how Grote can help you increase production and trim costs now and into the future? Contact our expert staff today, or click below to learn about our industry-leading automated food processing equipment.

 

View Our Food Assembly Automation Solutions