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Increasing production speed while keeping rejects low and quality consistent—and maintaining food safety—is the goal of every food and beverage processor. Today, many food processors look toward automation to provide the solutions needed to attain the necessary throughput to be competitive.

T. Marzetti is expanding its Horse Cave, Kentucky, processing facility by an extra 184,500 square feet after a recent groundbreaking ceremony. The facility manufactures salad dressings, sauces and other foods for retail and foodservice markets. The expansion will provide additional manufacturing space and include new equipment to increase dressing and sauce production, new processing kitchens, and several packaging lines to meet growing customer demand. The expansion is expected to be complete in the summer of 2022 and will create over 200 jobs for the region.

We in the trade press have been extolling the virtues of automation for a long time, and you’re probably sick of hearing us ramble on about it. Nevertheless, if there were any other reason to take a hard look at implementing automation—at least partially—in your facility, it would be now. COVID-19 has certainly created some practical problems: Short-staff due to people at home sick with coronavirus, social distancing impossible on cutting/protein lines, changeover time killing production output…and the list goes on.

Blackline Cold Storage has broken ground at the site of their new 298,000-square-foot cold storage facility to be owned in partnership with Artemis Real Estate Partners at the Port of Houston, Texas. The facility will provide approximately 70 new jobs to the area when the first phase of construction is complete on the 36-acre site in TGS Cedar Port Industrial Park.

Sysco announced two new online toolkits to its Foodie Solutions platform. The Labor & Hiring and Summer Solutions Toolkits are the latest in a series of carefully curated tools to help foodservice operators succeed while generating additional revenue and meeting consumer expectations.

A program to manage foreign materials must go beyond the equipment.

If you have old equipment, there is hope that you can keep what works and modernize it by pulling worthwhile information from it with instrumentation and controls.

There’s a helicopter on Mars.

It’s still pretty amazing to be able to type those words. 

While technological solutions help processors ensure data stays safe, human error is still a potential weakness.

The same technology that was able to provide microscopic tags to track and trace food has been applied to finding E. coli and Listeria