“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill; they want a quarter-inch hole.” You’ve probably heard this quote by Harvard professor Theodore Levitt. It illustrates the fact that people don’t buy products — they buy the benefits those products provide. It also describes TEGAM’s approach to temperature measurement. “People don’t just want a thermometer,” TEGAM […]

Food plants operate best when everything is moving smoothly. But there’s one small piece of equipment that processors may not even notice that they count on every day to carry an impressive burden while navigating challenging plant environments: casters. They’re everywhere in food processing, but you’ll be forgiven if you haven’t given them much thought […]

Foreign materials — particularly metals — are consistently a top cause of product recalls. That’s why metal detectors are found on just about every type of processing line. To learn more about current advancements in separation technology, we spoke with Eric Confer, the Market Manager for Light Industries at Eriez Magnetics. Eriez got its start […]

Automation, sanitation, safety, efficiency, workforce challenges — these topics have formed the basis of most of the interviews we’ve done with food processing suppliers for this article series. So far, we’ve focused on how individual machines and systems help manufacturers and processors address these issues. To get a broader, process-level perspective, we recently talked to […]

As food manufacturers struggle with the loss of seasoned workers and the lack of young people entering the industry, they’re looking to automation technology to fill in the gaps. To learn how automation can not only make production lines more efficient, but also help food companies preserve the institutional knowledge of retiring employees, we interviewed […]

Is it possible for companies to create delicate bread products by machine without sacrificing the exquisite structure and quality found in handmade bread? That’s exactly what Rheon set out to accomplish when it got its start in the baking industry back in 1963. Rheon is a Japanese company built around the concept of rheology, “a […]

Could food recalls and their related illnesses be a thing of the past? Yes, according to Jay McEvoy, the Director of Food Processing, North America, at Cooper-Atkins Corporation. That is, as long as food processing companies adopt the latest technologies. In 2016, we interviewed Cooper-Atkins’ Scott D’Aniello to learn about how the company’s cutting-edge temperature […]

In a food processing facility, production room floors fall into Environmental Monitoring Zone 2, i.e., areas that are directly adjacent to food contact surfaces. Because it’s so easy for any contaminants on the floor to make it into food — via airborne dust, water droplets, equipment, and even workers’ hands — the FDA and USDA […]

Processors want greater throughput of higher-quality foods — this is a common theme we’ve heard from many of the equipment manufacturers we’ve interviewed for this blog. Maintaining quality, especially while increasing throughput, requires processing equipment that handles products gently, without damaging them. For many products, that means making sure you don’t overheat them during thermal […]

Safety and quality — these are the two most important characteristics of food. By extension, they’re also the most important characteristics of food processing equipment. As a manufacturer of progressing cavity and rotary lobe pumps, NETZSCH has been in the safety and quality game a long time. The company has carved out a niche by […]