Wayne Labs has more than 30 years of editorial experience in industrial automation. He served as senior technical editor for I&CS/Control Solutions magazine for 18 years where he covered software, control system hardware and sensors/transmitters. Labs ran his own consulting business and contributed feature articles to Electronic Design, Control, Control Design, Industrial Networking and Food Engineering magazines. Before joining Food Engineering, he served as a senior technical editor for Omega Engineering Inc. Labs also worked in wireless systems and served as a field engineer for GE’s Mobile Communications Division and as a systems engineer for Bucks County Emergency Services. In addition to writing technical feature articles, Wayne covers FE’s Engineering R&D section.
Steam generators are known for their efficiency and saving energy, and retorts have been notorious users of steam. What have retorts done lately to save energy?
Chances are, you’ve probably been using the same HMI, MES or SCADA program for some time in your operation, and you’ve been through several version upgrades too. Providers of these products work hard to make their software backward compatible with equipment and operating systems as well as create new features users want.
While food and beverage processors have been scrambling to protect their process control equipment, intellectual property (IP) and IT/OT systems from cybersecurity/ransomware attacks, their efforts may be outpacing the Federal Government, which should be setting an example by having secured its own agencies from cyberattacks.
Dot Foods, Inc., said to be North America’s largest food industry redistributor, has acquired Morsum, a food industry data and AI platform technology company.
It is important for organizations to have a solid forecasting system in place for budgeting already, but even more so now with rising costs and inflation.
While we hope the COVID-19 pandemic is fading into the background, we still need to be concerned with labor shortages, transportation interruptions, political issues, weather extremes, and other peripheral circumstances that can still break critical links in the supply chain.