The State of Food Manufacturing Presented by: Casey Laughman, - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

The State of Food Manufacturing

Presented by: Casey Laughman, Editor-in-Chief, Food Engineering

State of the In Industry ry

• Two-thirds of respondents expect increased throughput
• More than a third say budgets for packaging, processing and production

equipment are increasing

• Almost 30 percent say budget for automation and control hardware and software

is increasing; a third of those say their budget is increasing by more than 25 percent

Top 10 trends

1. Automation 2. Efficiency/maintenance/new equipment 3. Clean label/healthy foods 4. E-commerce 5. Food safety/FSMA 6. Decline in workers/worker availability 7. Sustainability 8. Consumer demand 9. Costs

• 10. Packaging

Automation

• Controls, software, sensors and transmitters
• Robots/cobots, with easier programming for operators
• Data collection at more points throughout the production process
• Mobile devices for data collection, wayfinding, employee and product tracking

and tracing

Food Safety/FSMA

• Recall/food safety management
• Supply chain challenges
• FSMA effects

Food Safety/FSMA

• FSMA requires risk management

for upstream risks

• Processors can track ingredients

inside their plant, but the steps

• f the supply chain are still a

challenge

• Blockchain may eliminate “one

forward, one back”

Supply chain challenges

Food Safety/FSMA

• FDA is moving from education to enforcement
• Tight fiscal controls can limit options for responding
• Radiological risks are one particular area where companies are struggling

FSMA effects

Decline in in workers/worker availability

• Immigration
• Skills and gender gap
• Low unemployment rate

Decline in in workers/worker availability Immigration

• Skilled workers are harder to find/get approved for visas
• Unskilled workers are often undocumented or “documented”
• If all immigration is restricted, workers of any skill level will become more rare
• Finding citizens to do the jobs is still a challenge

Decline in in workers/worker availability Skills and gender gap

• 2 million manufacturing jobs unfilled

by 2025

• 21 percent of workers retiring in the

next five years

• Groups such as FIRST trying to fill the

gap with robotics competitions to get young people interested

• Engineering and other technical

careers still seen as a “boy’s club”

Cannabis

• When was the last time we saw an entirely new product market appear?

Cannabis

• Technical challenges
• Financial challenges
• Regulatory challenges
• Moral qualms

Where do we go from here?

• Increased automation
• New ways to address worker shortages
• Challenges of accurately predicting consumer demand
• Thinking of food manufacturing as manufacturing

Conclusion

• This industry changes slowly until it doesn’t
• Turning the cruise ship
• Too big to fail? Or too big to succeed?