As COVID-19 reshapes the international manufacturing landscape, food and beverage companies are looking at ways to optimize their production efficiencies.
Food processing and packaging operations have always needed to respond with agility and efficiency to ever-changing consumer tastes and habits. That means a constant drive to bring new or modified products to market faster while maintaining productivity and profit margins.
Active, smart and intelligent packaging solutions are used with food, pharmaceuticals and several other types of products to help extend shelf life, monitor freshness with temperature control, display information on quality, improve safety and improve user convenience.
The debate between cloud and edge computing strategies remains a point of contention for many controls engineers in the packaging industry. Using advanced analytics algorithms, companies can sift through this mass of information, or Big Data, to identify areas for improvement.
Packaging companies are operating in a rapidly and dramatically changing economy. The landscape is increasingly digital, requiring new ways to make transactions and position products online.
2019 seemed to be the year of refining. Be it ecommerce campaigns, seasonal packaging or moving into a new sector, consumer packaged goods companies, manufacturers and designers worked with what they had and made it better.
As a longtime supplier of flexible packaging machinery, I have had the unique opportunity to work with a number of companies to help them solve their evolving packaging challenges and continue to evolve their packaging— from large companies to a growing number of entrepreneurial startups.
Having partnered with specialty food brands for nearly two decades, I've learned more than a few things along the way. Specializing in only food CPG brands has allowed me to finely hone in on best practices that can transform packaging into a workhorse to sell itself, be it on the shelf or online.
As automation technologies progress, there are more opportunities for machinery to respond directly to input from human operators. This is why a good human-machine interface (HMI) is extremely important.
For years, fiber lasers have been a mainstay in the electronics, automotive and aerospace markets with their ability to produce alphanumeric text on the surfaces of hard plastic and metal parts. Now, fiber lasers are gaining a foothold in consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturing.