Get Your Food Safety on Track

The food production and processing industry presents harsh conditions for products, systems and components within its environment – placing processing engineers, quality control personnel and plant management in a sticky situation.  

Continuous exposure to pressure washers, hot steam, cold water jets, temperature variations and aggressive cleaning agents and disinfectants can create a myriad of food safety issues including contamination. The result of this can have dire consequences for consumer health, as well as presenting significant financial, reputational and legal issues for food producers and processors.

Foodborne illness remains a foremost concern for Australia’s food industry. In 2010 alone, an estimated annual 4.1 million cases of foodborne gastroenteritis were reported in Australia. In addition to risks to consumer well-being, food production and processing companies will attest that supplying contaminated or inedible food will also lead to considerable financial losses and brand damage.

In 2012, a peanut-related Salmonella outbreak at a manufacturing plant in the US state of Georgia led to the recall of 3,900 products involving over 70 companies – all of whom experienced reputational damage and a share in an economic impact estimated to exceed $1 billion USD.

Therefore eliminating the potential for contamination to enter food production processes is essential to maintaining proper adherence to regulations and safety standards, as well as maintaining the reputation of your brand – a job that can be achieved with effective traceability systems. 

Food traceability is the process of tracking a product’s history and sharing that data along the entire processing path from production to processing to distribution. While traceability has always been important for the food and beverage industry, in recent years the need for ‘real time recalls’ has increased, due to plant processing errors and recalls that saw Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) notified of 586 food and beverage recalls during the 10-year period between 2005 and 2014.

Real-time track and trace solutions, such as RFID, can ensure that a product is accurately tracked at every stage of the supply chain and data is reliably and accurately gathered. At every step of the process, the status of a product can be detected and that information passed to databases for storage, analysis and traceability purposes – giving companies peace of mind and visibility over their products.

Traceability a must for food safety

There are particularly stringent hygiene requirements in the food and beverage production arena, which also have an effect on the packaging process. Sensor systems from SICK are used in dry and wet areas in these industries, and they cannot fail to impress with their extraordinarily high availability and flexibility. The user-friendliness of SICK sensors ensures reduced machine downtime during product changes.

In order to remain competitive and maintain a reputable brand within today’s highly competitive global food and beverage industry, it is essential for companies to implement appropriate traceability sensors and sensor systems which offer complete documentation on the product's route through production – ultimately allowing companies to minimise the scale of recalls and ensure consumer safety.

Click here for information on SICK’s range of products for the food and beverage industry.