Software: The essential ingredient for consistency

Food product consistency is crucial

In prepared foods, being able to produce consistent quality is vital to protect consumers and brand reputation. Your customers and end consumers must be able to trust that their food meets exact product specifications every single time. It must have the right flavor, appearance, proportions, and weight, and most importantly, it must meet strict food safety and quality standards—no exceptions.

Failure to meet these standards can be dangerous for consumers and disastrous for your business. And when irregular or unsafe products reach the public, they can cause consumer complaints, serious illness, and costly recalls. Inconsistent quality can quickly add up to major food wastage and lost profits. It is therefore essential to ensure that your products are uniformly delicious and safe.

Inconsistent methods mean inconsistent products

Creating consistent, high-quality products is challenging because it requires every operator to follow every procedure the same way every time. Before starting each production run, operators need to prepare ingredients, place the right machines in the right order, and adjust numerous different machine and manual settings that differ for every product. Without step-by-step guidance, each operator may perform these tasks differently, and new operators will fall well short of the knowledge, speed, and accuracy of the more experienced workers. Individual performance also varies as each operator’s energy and focus levels fluctuate throughout their shifts. Adding to the challenge of achieving uniformity, most food processing companies produce a range of different products, requiring that operators change between multiple different machines, settings, ingredients, and procedures over the course of their shift.

Without the right support, these factors make your factory highly vulnerable to human errors that can interfere with your goal of creating excellent products. Working in such a complex system is also stressful and difficult for operators, making it harder to find new staff and leading to underperformance and low retention of your existing staff. Having the right software can help you address these issues and more and create an enormous positive impact for your business.

Marel’s Convenience Line Software provides operator guidance

Marel’s Convenience Line Software helps each equipment operator work more easily and reliably by providing essential guidance via a user-friendly dashboard. The system guides operators clearly through convenience line machine setup, telling them which settings and ingredients to use and how to manage these factors to ensure a stable process. It shows when and how to do QC measurements, feeding data automatically into the system so that it’s visible instantly. When there is a non-conformity, it guides the operator on how to proceed, and when a product is out of specification, it immediately raises flags so that quality control managers can act fast. It also sets limits for each operator on which machine program settings they are authorized to change.

By providing this guidance, Marel’s Convenience Line Software helps to ensure that each operator knows exactly what they’re supposed to be doing and that they are performing tasks correctly and consistently, leaving less room for variation and mistakes. This is beneficial not only for product quality and safety, but also for your staff. The support from software makes work faster, easier, less stressful, and more interesting. This can help you reduce labor costs while making it easier to find good employees and minimize staff turnover.

Marel’s Convenience Line Software helps you achieve complete production control

Operator guidance is just one of many incredibly useful features of Marel’s Convenience Line Software. For example, it also provides vital real-time data-driven insights , generates alarm reports that include information on overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), ensures the reliable collection of QC data, and helps managers optimize yield and food safety.