New Processing Equipment: April 2023
Snack and bakery manufacturers use process controls like analyzers and sensors to ensure that products meet the needed specifications for qualities like color, moisture, safety, and perhaps most importantly, taste and mouthfeel.
Sensure
Website: Sensure
Among the companies developing process control systems for the snack and bakery industries is Sensure, Bergamo, Italy, which has released Sensure Synapse Bakery, a vision system that uses artificial intelligence and self-learning to monitor the quality of a wide variety of goods including biscuits, crackers, cakes, pizza, and bread, automatically rejecting non-compliant products.
The product uses cameras or lasers to collect data about the shape, size, thickness, volume, temperature, and other characteristics of products that pass through its vision systems, enabling the end user to not only reject bad products but also improve the process, says Sensure CEO Daniele Vaglietti.
“With our data, you can see trends inside the line,” he says. “If the color of the product is changing, or the diameter of a cookie, or the thickness of a doughnut … we can give a message to the operator to change something on the line, using our data. We can also save in our database the temperature of the oven, the speed of the line, and the ingredients our customer is using. We can mix all this data, using AI, and provide root causes.”
As part of Sensure’s upgrades over the past year, customers can build real-time dashboards with historical reporting capability, Vaglietti says. “They can act on the line very fast to do preventing monitoring of the line,” he says. “It can reduce the cost of energy consumption, become more sustainable and reduce food waste. They can support the maintenance team and preventive checking.”
Key Technology, Inc.
Website: Key Technology Inc.
Key Technology, Inc., Walla Walla, WA, supplies automated sorting and inspection equipment under the Veryx 2.0 brand that helps select product that conforms to quality standards, while identifying and removing contaminants, foreign materials, and other “non-product matter,” according to Marco Azzaretti, director of marketing and product development.
“There’s obviously zero tolerance on the part of any baked good processor for any type of contaminant,” he says. “We want to remove 100%. … It’s an increasingly important part of those lines to be effective and efficient in doing so. There’s a high cost if foreign materials reach the consumer and significant consequences in terms of recall.”
In automating inspecting tasks previously performed by humans, Key Technology’s automated equipment reduces both labor costs and hiring and retention challenges, improving both efficiency and profitability, Azzarretti says. “It performs the task of removing foreign material more effectively than a human would,” he says. “And the equipment serves as a line information center for the processor. By virtue of its operation, our equipment needs to see literally every object that flows through the processing line.”
That information is shared in different ways, through reports and databases, which can be analyzed and provide a dynamic, real-time understanding of the product as it travels through the line, Azzarretti says. The system enables the end user “to be able to understand if an upstream piece of process equipment is not performing its function correctly and resulting in a product that has some quality deviations from the norm,” he says. “It’s also able, in real-time, to send an alert when there are conditions or situations on the line that are spotted by the sensors that need to be addressed.”
One of Key Technology’s customers produces a snack with a chocolate center and an outer coating, which Veryx inspects to make sure that, first of all, the shape is correct, and secondly, that the coating is properly applied so that the chocolate center is properly covered, Azzaretti says. “Prior to our implementing the sorter, there would be significant delays between a production defect occurring on the line and corrective action, with somebody noticing and then going upstream and solving the issue,” he says. “During that period of time there would be a lot of production rejected because the line was producing product that was out of spec.”
KPM Analytics
Website: KPM Analytics
KPM Analytics, Westborough, MA, has developed the Mixolab 2 universal dough characterizer, which the company describes as an all-in-one flour and dough analysis instrument that can be used with a variety of baked goods. The line measures the rheology properties of the flour and dough to tell the customer what type(s) of flour they need for a tortilla vs. cookies vs. bread or buns, says Yuegang Zhao, chief commercial officer.
“Process control, or quality control, starts with the selection of materials,” he says. “Especially in the baking business, a lot of customers start with the notion that a flour is a flour, and they take the specifications from the millers and use the same numbers from different millers, assuming the flours are the same. We are trying to educate the customer that there are a lot more properties in the flour that are not labeled or specified from the miller that are critical to their processes.”
The company’s recently released AlveoPC product measures the tenacity, extendability, elasticity, and baking strength of dough, monitoring incoming wheat and flour to ensure high-quality ingredients, improving efficiency, providing insights into dough behavior, and measuring and adapting flour according to specifications.
“People are interested in whole grain products, but there’s not a lot of quantitative measurements of whole grain,” Zhao says. “They can now have a standard way of specifying the flour and using it to communicate that to baking systems so they can use it in the process.”
The company’s Sightline vision inspection systems (which measure color, size, shape, volume, and defects generated throughout the process) are used during three stages of the process: before packaging so they can inspect and reject the product as needed, during the baking itself so be able to see adjustments that need to be made in real-time, and thirdly, so the product can be taken off the line to see internal structures and make improvements as needed, Zhao says.
“For example, if a customer has a yield problem, that means they cannot meet their customers’ specifications on color, let’s say, or the size of the buns,” Zhao states. “It’s very difficult to understand why you have a yield problem if the recipe doesn’t change or your process doesn’t change. By implementing our tools, they can start, first of all, to make sure they don’t have bad products; then they can actually start to see if it’s a volume problem after the proofer, and therefore you need to proof longer; or the color is not correct, maybe something is happening inside the oven.”
With that fine-tuned information at different steps of the process, the end user can focus their energy on solving where the problem is, Zhao says. “A customer might change vendors for the supplier of the flour,” he says. “Even though the flour has the same specifications, it could be a completely different flour. And they wouldn’t know unless they use our product to test the impact.”