Handbook of Food Factory Design by Christopher G. J. Baker

Author:Christopher G. J. Baker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer New York, New York, NY

9.5.2 Production Records

Food quality and safety monitoring provide increasing incentives for real-time logging and display of trends in process and product measurements in all sectors of food processing. In the USA, the identification of critical control points in HACCP programs is encouraging methodical product sampling, test methods and decision criteria, which are obvious applications for real-time data processing. In the UK the “Control of Substances Hazardous to Health” (COSHH) regulations, introduced in 1990 by the UK Health and Safety Executive, impose a duty of care on food manufacturers, which is increasingly being met by installing automatic logging of process and product quality data. These further uses for plant data records will draw more staff from departments other than engineering into the teams, which specify requirements for sensors and closed-loop control.

Robotic aspects of flexible manufacturing systems are another factor likely to influence plant-wide data software policy. Robotics in food factories has so far been largely confined to assembling boxed product on pallets, and to warehouse automation. In both tasks it is incidental that the containers are for food—the same robots are used in many other industrial packing and warehouse operations. There is a food-specific robot application at a Unilever company in the UK, on a production line for a range of frozen foods. Here the incentive is to replace human operators in the unsociable environment. In this small application there are 16 motors, ten of which are part of the robot system; the other six provide simple conveying under local control. Automatic optical inspection is an integral part of the system.

An interactive online quality control system was used to link sensors installed for process control to quality control recorders at the Kilmeaden Cheese Plant, Co. Waterford, Ireland. Fitzgerald et al. (1998) show how the system increased the empowerment of the process operators by providing them with all necessary information and with decision support mechanisms. Process control systems in the factory used Ethernet to link the operational areas. HACCP, ISO 9000 and product quality recording were all part of a customized Microsoft Access database. The multiple information resource points were transparent to the user, who was presented with a single standardized and uniform environment. Significant productivity savings were claimed, together with the advantage of eliminating several intermediate stages of documentation; in turn, the need to hold and maintain identical hard-copy manuals in different parts of the plant was eliminated. Despite these improvements, the plant was closed in 2006 and production of the well-known Kilmeadan cheddar moved to Ballyragget, Kilkenny.

Reviewing the application of HACCP to seafood processing, Garrett and Hudak-Roos (1990) noted that 13 process critical control points and 23 sanitation points have been identified for cooked shrimp. For this and most other seafood operations, heat transfer to the product is more rapid than for bulkier meat products. It is required that stored seafood be thawed before processing, and a warning is required if the water temperature falls due to the presence of frozen material.

The discharge from the first stage of wrapping is

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