Safety, cleanliness, and branding are crucial in the food industry. In today’s fast-paced living, most people care about the food they eat to ensure their health and safety. It’s vital to preserve the food’s nutritional value, eliminate harmful microorganisms, and keep the food processing compliant with strict manufacturing standards. Hence, food companies continue to find ways to attain these goals.
Innovation and technology can help food businesses thrive and become more competitive while safeguarding consumer food safety. Check out the following food industry trends to watch out this 2022:
1. Packaging Automation
Food packaging automation ensures the manufacturing of the highest quality food products in the market. Industry-leading and state-of-the-art food packaging machines will keep food manufacturing running faster in 2022, reducing costly machine downtime and increasing overall productivity.
Food businesses can avail of the following packaging automation systems at tdipacksys.com/ and any other reputable suppliers:
- Seal Systems: These stainless or powder-coated, high-speed machines automate the packaging process by creating stand-up or flat pouches in minutes. Seal systems can save you money and labor from using pre-made pouches.
- Horizontal Flow Wrapping Systems: Overwrapping food and non-food products are possible using a horizontal flow wrapping system. It provides a film barrier to ensure product containment for snacks, baked goods, and confections. A wrapping system is also used to display brand logos or marketing information.
- Robotic Packing Systems: The food industry can greatly benefit from automation using robotic packing systems, thereby maximizing efficiency. Such an innovative machine can handle all aspects of packing food products, from conveying, indexing, and auto case erection, to packing, case closing, and palletizing.
- Scale and Dosing Systems: Food manufacturing businesses can fully automate their filling process with the highest accuracy using scale and dosing systems. These machines can minimize waste when manufacturing powders and granules, like seasonings, spices, and vegetable and fruit products.
2. Inspection Systems
Poor quality and contaminated food products can result in complaints, claims, and lawsuits. Such issues can damage business reputation and consumer trust. Thus, food business franchises and food manufacturing companies, and even restaurants and catering businesses, should deploy inspection systems to avoid these problems.
The food industry can embrace cutting-edge inspection systems this 2022 to ensure excellent product quality and safety. Advanced inspection systems can detect foreign materials, verify the weight, and confirm product integrity.
Some food inspection systems and their corresponding features and benefits are as follows:
- Metal Detectors: These machines can detect metal traces, such as cast iron and stainless steel in meat, dairy products, bakery items, and other food products. Some examples include metal tags, bolts, screws, blades, and screen wires that can contaminate goods during the food production process.
- Color Sorters: Discolored and misshaped food products can be detected by color sorters. Food businesses can use such machines to check and remove contaminants from bulk food products, such as plastic, wood, glass, stones, and shells.
- Checkweighers: It’s critical to follow the listed weight in food products to comply with laws and protect the brand. Check-weighing systems ensure accurate weight during food processing that companies can fully integrate with real-time monitoring and reporting.
3. Healthy Catering Business
In the past, catering businesses offered festive, buffet-style, or shared food. The latest trend in 2022 is building a healthy catering business, in which newer orders will be packed individually. For instance, catering businesses can use box lunches rather than large trays. In work-from-home setups, managers can send food gifts and treats to their remote employees in individual packages. These include gourmet cookies, fresh produce, or pizza deliveries for a virtual snack and any other employee engagement purposes.
4. Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) mimics the human thinking process in computer systems. The different AI algorithms include logic programming, reinforcement learning, expert system, swarm intelligence, cognitive science, and artificial neural network.
AI is a recent food industry technology that keeps up with the world’s rising food demand. It consists of intelligent systems to manage tasks such as food quality determination, food classification, and control tools. Integrating AI with other devices can benefit both consumers and industry players. These devices may include an electronic tongue, electronic nose, near-infrared spectroscopy, and computer vision system.
The food industry can further utilize expert systems, powered by AI, for a smarter decision-making process. Some applications include the winemaking fermentation process and calculating the food nutritional value for the end-users.
5. Tightening Supply Chains
Business leaders predict that the ongoing supply chain crisis won’t end anytime soon. Port congestions and the increasing demand for food supply and commodities continue to increase. In addition, shipping costs are soaring, and companies struggle to move goods around because there aren’t enough containers and ships available.
The recent demand surge for transport, energy, and labor significantly pressures cross-border supply chains. As supply chain problems rise rapidly, tightening its operations is vital in 2022. So, what can the business players in the food industry do to tighten their supply chains?
Food companies need to be flexible with their sourcing, manufacturing, and distribution strategies. Therefore, modernizing food manufacturing operations is a practical solution to be more competitive and thrive in the tough business world. This is possible by using smart devices, connected factory operations, and real-time data access.
Moreover, collaborating with shipping and delivery services should be strengthened to avoid delays and food wastage due to sluggish logistics. Employing a reliable centralized system to handle the supply chain is highly recommended. In this way, all aspects of supply chain management are checked without missing any important step along the way that can jeopardize operations and consumer satisfaction.
Conclusion
Because of the fast-paced and digital lifestyle of most people nowadays, it’s worth embracing technological innovations to keep up with food product demand without compromising consumer health and safety. Food supply chain should also employ modernization strategies to avoid delays and disruptions.
Adopting the mentioned food industry trends this 2022, such as packaging automation and inspection systems, is essential for every food-related business. Aside from food safety, these trends can also help maximize food processing productivity and efficiency and reduce labor and material cost.
