Automated Food and Beverage Traceability and Quality Inspections

In food and beverage manufacturing, ensuring food safety and quality is crucial, but it’s also increasingly important to save labor and costs.

This is where advances in automation technology are helping many food and beverage companies gain a crucial edge.

Using next-generation machine vision technology, many companies can completely automate their food and packaging traceability, visual inspections and quality checks. They can trace, identify and inspect all the products, bottles, containers and packages moving through their production and packaging lines—all with machine precision and accuracy within 10 microns.

This article will review how Motion’s customers do this with Zebra machine vision sensors. These offer fixed industrial scanning and machine vision in a single platform with plug-and-play simplicity and can help you start automating tasks in minutes.

Automating Traceability and Inspections with Machine Vision

If you’re unfamiliar with Zebra machine vision, the technology is straightforward but extremely powerful. Each machine vision sensor is a sophisticated imaging device that can act as a fixed-position scanner or a hi-res camera. This means it can instantly capture and analyze barcodes, direct part marks, and text characters, or perform sophisticated visual inspections of target objects—even at high speeds, in tight spaces, at difficult angles, or in poor lighting.

In many food and beverage manufacturing and packaging operations, this technology is used to automate and error-proof various processes and tasks, including:

• Automatically scanning and tracing products and packages by 1D/2D barcodes.
• Checking dates, lot codes and use-by dates using optical character recognition (OCR).
• Counting, routing and sorting products and packaging on conveyor lines.
• Inspecting labels for presence, position, content, orientation and print quality.
• Verifying correct labels against master barcodes or label images.
• Inspecting packages for proper sealing, defects or non-conformity.
• Checking bottle caps, fill levels, cap height, skew and safety sealing.
• Visually detecting and identifying foreign material in products.
• Detecting scratches, cracks, bubbles, color degradation or wrapping issues.
• Checking for the presence of items and inserts in kits and packages.
• Confirming correct case codes for seasonal, event or time-sensitive packaging.
• Identifying different product boxes and routing each type for robotic palletization.

Zebra sensors automate these and other tasks by using built-in advanced imaging, decoding algorithms, lighting, liquid lenses and other tools. Each sensor can capture up to 16 images of each target object, each image with its own settings for filters, contrast, edge detection, presence/absence detection, comparisons and more.

This allows the sensor to perform sophisticated data capture and visual inspection that far surpasses human capabilities. It also happens at extremely high speeds, with built-in image processing that recognizes and analyzes items accurately within 10 microns, even if your target objects are moving on high-speed conveyors.

As each scan or image is captured and analyzed, machine vision sensors communicate with your production or packaging systems to transmit and share the results. Products or packages can automatically get the green light as they pass through your processes, or your sensors might detect and trigger exception alerts, flag problems, and identify non-conformity issues before they move further downstream. You can also store images on-premise or in the cloud for compliance recordkeeping and later review.

How to Get Machine Vision Up and Running

One of the biggest reasons we recommend Zebra machine vision technology is that it’s the only hardware platform offering both fixed industrial scanning and machine vision capabilities in one device with one software application to configure it, and it’s all plug-and-play.

Zebra’s small, compact and rugged devices fit virtually anywhere and can be mounted or installed with various mounting and accessory options. All lighting is handled onboard the device through built-in illumination and liquid lensing. But, if you need support for external lighting or C-mount lenses, Zebra supports these additional devices.

Once your sensors are in position, they can run via USB-C or Power over Ethernet, or you can use traditional 24V DC. Each sensor can also transmit data via USB-C or Ethernet, so you can get power and data through a single cable for simplicity. Zebra’s devices support all standard industrial communication protocols, including TCP/IP, Ethernet/IP, Modbus, Profinet and CC-Link.

Importantly, you don’t need a separate PC or workstation to view captured images. Just use USB-C or one of the device’s other flexible inputs and outputs to connect directly to a monitor.

Once your devices are powered up and connected, you can quickly and easily configure your automated scanning, OCR or visual inspections using Zebra’s simple and easy-to-use Aurora software. There’s just one software application for both fixed industrial scanning and machine vision, and the user interface uses sliders and radio buttons to easily adjust every setting.

Zebra’s software includes built-in tutorials, as well as an AutoTune feature and a Golden Image Compare tool, so you can save time and dial in the right settings for most jobs within minutes. Once your hardware and imaging are ready, start scanning, tracing and visually inspecting products and packaging on all your manufacturing and packaging lines with precise, reliable results.

It all adds up to the automation industry’s most user-friendly platform for scanning, OCR and visual inspection, quickly making huge fans out of Motion’s automation experts.

To learn more about Zebra machine vision for food and beverage production and packaging, contact our team at Motion Automation Intelligence. We’ll be happy to answer questions, set up a consultation, make recommendations, and provide everything needed to design, build and deploy machine vision systems in your operations.