Increasing efficiency and quality in food production with machine vision - Machine Vision

There are many factors driving innovation in the food and beverage industry, such as avoiding costly recalls food recalls and outbreaks of foodborne illness, meeting stringent regulations and meeting rising consumer expectations. To meet these goals, food and beverage manufacturers are constantly looking for new ways to implement food safety processes with greater speed, efficiency and quality control.

Zebra Machine Vision cameras play a role in every step of the production process. They enable monitoring throughout the entire production process, ensuring that only the highest quality food products reach consumers. Many automated production lines also rely on these systems to speed up previously time-consuming manual inspection processes.


Visual product inspection and label inspection
Many food manufacturing plants still rely on manual inspections, which are subjective, prone to human error and time-consuming. Machine vision cameras support visual inspection processes - from verifying the presence or absence of parts to measuring product dimensions. In addition to minimizing human error, these systems are fast and can support high-speed production lines. Cameras can also be used to check product label content, print quality, position or orientation, confirm the presence of a label or check date and batch codes. Another option is to use these devices as part of larger optical character recognition (OCR) systems.

Quality control
Machine vision cameras can improve the quality of your food products and help you lépely comply with food regulations and safety guidelines and meet high customer expectations. Two applications where we see these benefits in action include:

• Food packaging: the cameras can inspect food packaging, including labels, seals and tamper-proof tapes, at various levels of the process, ensuring quality right up to the moment the product reaches the store. These technologies can ensure the presence or absence of products before packaging or verify the expiry date. They also provide important feedback to other operations, for example providing coordinates for the correct placement of the product in the packaging.
  
• Bottling of beverages: Cameras ensure product quality by checking fill levels, cap quality, labels and other quality or allergen information. They can also check tamper-proof seals and the colour of the cap and ensure that the correct cap is placed on the bottle.

Tracking and tracing
With advanced decoding power, the cameras can enhance tracking and tracing capabilitiesby creating a digital record of their inventory for downstream logistics. The use of machine vision technology to enhance food traceability capabilities also helps to maintain food safety during production in crisis situationspublic health emergencies - such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic - and can help you better manage supply chain challenges caused by market situations.

Whether you need simple or complex quality controls in your operation, we have the ideal solution for you. Please do not hesitate to contact our sales department for more information .