While food packaging may seem more like a sales and marketing focus than anything else, it in fact plays an even more critical role in the food manufacturing and retail processes including traceability, product detection and data acquisition – all with flow on effects to the safety of consumers.
Effective packaging is directly linked to traceability or the ability to track and any food through all stages of production, processing and distribution. According to Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ) traceability enables corrective actions (such as a product recall) to be implemented quickly and effectively when something goes wrong.
Packaging within the food industry therefore must enable an effective traceability system that can help isolate and prevent contaminated products from reaching consumers. On the flip side, with an inefficient system, product quality can be compromised and a product recall can wreak havoc on a financial and reputational level.
With major consequences to consumers brought on by food contamination including illness and in the worst cases even death, companies must be able to trace back the trajectory of their products from the producer, through the processing stages, to retailers – putting packaging and accurate product identification in the spotlight.
As well as satisfying safety and traceability purposes, effective packaging also enables companies to achieve necessary product detection, measurement, protection, monitoring and inspection, and effectively manage and identify relevant data.
SICK sensors and sensor systems meet the requirements of the packaging industry
With millions of products being processed around the world every day, the packaging industry requires sensors and sensor systems that are tailored to complex, frequently changing tasks, while meeting the increasingly challenging standards for trademark protection, safety, and traceability.
Vision technology from SICK is used in the food and beverage industry to detect not only the position of goods and packaging and measure their dimensions, volume, and contours, but also to check their level of quality. This technology generates a great deal of process data, enabling better monitoring and automation of production, processing, and packaging processes, whether in the primary, secondary, or final packaging stage.
Detecting & Measuring – Differently sized products require flexible machines and a broad spectrum of intelligent sensors to detect objects and measure physical sizes – a challenge met by SICK’s modern sensors that feature automatic teach-in and diagnostic capabilities.
Protecting – The modular construction of modern packaging requires an intelligent and flexible safety concept. SICK safety solutions ensure the protection of personnel and machines, optimised production, reduced machine footprint and reduced downtime.
Monitoring & Inspecting – In order to ensure constant high quality with high throughput speeds on packaging machines, a quality control system is needed that meets the highest requirements. SICK's distance sensors and vision sensors support nearly every type of monitoring.
Managing & Identifying data – Reliable identification of objects is a prerequisite for a smooth packaging process that lays the foundations for traceability and continuous quality improvement. SICK offers a wide range of both permanently installed and mobile readers for bar codes, 2D codes and RFID technologies.
For information on SICK’s range of products for the packaging industry, click here.