How Vision Inspection Systems Boost Efficiency In Food Processing And Packaging Lines
By Melissa Lind, contributing writer
In the food industry, ensuring the quality of products is essential to consumer safety and a thriving business. Automated visual inspection can help your company meet and exceed regulation compliance, improve customer satisfaction, and boost the efficiency in processing lines.
Between increasingly-stringent food safety regulations and consumers’ desire for high-quality products, ensuring that your company’s product meets high-quality standards is more essential than ever. There are many roads food makers can travel to achieve these goals, but automated vision inspection in processing and packaging lines may provide value to help your company gain a competitive edge.
Aside from the regulatory risk, the costs associated with any type of error in food manufactured or processed that enters the market are high. The hard costs of recalls, combined with the loss of customer confidence and reduction in brand loyalty, can have a catastrophic effect on a company’s ability to flourish. Automated vision inspection equipment can help to ensure safety and improve quality of your company’s product and increase efficiency in your food processing line. Vision inspection systems can:
- Read barcodes and printed text, which helps reduce the number of misbranded or mislabeled products leaving a facility
- Distinguish between many different types of package markings
- Identify missing components
- Ensure consistent product size and shape
- Check for inadequate seals
Today’s vision inspection systems use smart software enabling the system to learn about your company’s products, which, ultimately, allows the system to adapt to your product’s specifications.
In addition to these advantages, new technology in vision inspection allows the systems to be integrated with other automated equipment. Vison inspection systems can link up to information management systems allowing for the collection of data to be used in process improvement.
Needless to say, automated or robotic visual inspection systems are also more efficient and effective than humans as they offer increased performance over human inspection in:
- Accuracy — machine “eyes” are not subject to fatigue or inattention
- Consistency — automated systems are not affected by operator differences
- Efficiency — automation equipment is able to process a much higher number of products in a particular time period than human operators
- Hygiene — vision inspection systems offer significantly less exposure to all types of contaminants than its human counterparts
- Cost-Effectiveness — automation can allow facility managers to shift human work hours to other areas. Additionally, the cost of these systems has greatly reduced in recent years
- Flexibility — machinery can be utilized for more than one product type with minimal to no downtime due to changeover
Likely, a human inspection may still be required at some points, but the bulk of the man-hours previously spent in routine inspection can be better utilized to address other concerns within food processing or packaging facility. In a competitive market, with stringent regulatory requirements and increasingly complex consumer demands, automating vision inspection is becoming less of a luxury and more of a necessity.