Running a manufacturing business is already challenging in itself. All the more is this truer when you’re dealing with something valuable and important: food. A food manufacturing business has many factors to consider for them to stay on top of the competition. Among all others, the most important relate to quality and food safety.
It’s easy to see how a food manufacturing business today is under so much pressure to maintain operations. Increasing customer demand means higher efficiency, but never at the expense of food safety and quality. Otherwise, you’ll lose clients in favor of other companies who abide by the most stringent operation standards of food quality.
To keep up with higher customer demand and safety requirements, it’s important to aim for efficiency and quality in food manufacturing. Here’s how:
1. Be Very Particular About The Ingredients
The quality of food products that are subject to further packaging and manufacturing rests on the quality of the ingredients. Naturally, if the ingredients are of poor quality, then the resulting food products won’t be as good. Thus, before packaging or manufacturing food, you have to be more selective about where you source the ingredients. This entails researching how and where those ingredients were farmed or created, as well as learning more about fluid viscosity, as this can affect the texture of the food product
2. Maintain A High Level Of Supply
Your supply chain manager or team has a significant role in ensuring efficiency in your food manufacturing process. To keep up with the strong demand, it’s a must to maintain a high level of supply. But this has to be balanced with possible seasons of weak orders. Otherwise, the result can be an excessive waste of ingredients that have gone spoiled or rotten. A food or produce ERP software can help you balance the supply and demand.
Maintaining a good supply chain necessarily entails having enough ingredients and supplies whenever it’s needed. You should never be in a situation where food manufacturing has to be halted as there aren’t enough ingredients to meet that demand.
In an ideal supply chain, your team should have visibility to view each supply’s journey right from the production source to its arrival at the intended destination or wholesale and retail clients. One of the best ways to achieve better supply chain management is to take advantage of supply chain management software or tools, like food and beverage ERP services. This type of software can automate your monitoring processes, allowing higher efficiency, accuracy, and productivity.
3. Invest In Good Machinery and Kitchen Equipment
Perhaps the machinery you’re currently using in your food manufacturing plant isn’t necessarily the best in terms of efficiency, machinery, and quality. If you think this is true for your business, it’s always a good idea to invest in good machinery. There are companies like Searose Environmental that can provide full-service machinery and parts for food manufacturing, everything from clean rooms to industrial dehumidification and even food grade flexible hose supplies, there’s a lot of machinery and commercial kitchen equipment that you may be able to upgrade.
Regularly updating your current machinery can keep you ahead of the competition. This means you’re up-to-date with the latest technology in food manufacturing, all of which are used to your advantage.
The principles of top quality and sanitary food manufacturing equipment include:
- Meeting the standards of the latest sanitizing and cleaning protocols;
- Compatibility to other existing systems and equipment;
- Accessibility for cleaning, inspection, and maintenance.
4. Choose Top Quality Packaging And Labeling
Packaging plays an important role in ensuring the food products you manufacture don’t go bad quickly––it should avoid premature spoilage. When you’re shipping your food products, it should also avoid spillage. Also, in today’s time, efficient and top-quality packaging also meets the highest standards of sustainability.
Then, going even deeper are the proper labels. The packaging can only do so much if the labels supporting it aren’t well made. Labels are very important in food products, as it’s responsible for transparency. Apart from knowing the nutrition facts of the labels, it also ensures that anyone who has a possible allergy to any of your ingredients won’t make the mistake of consuming your food products. Otherwise, you could be liable for lack of proper labeling, making your food products unsafe for consumption
Achieving good quality packaging and labeling starts with finding the right supplier for your packaging supplies. So, be sure to select and design the packaging type appropriate for the food products you’re manufacturing.
5. Strive For Sustainability
Today, efficiency in manufacturing plants also necessarily entails abiding by the standards set forth by sustainability. When you do this, it’s not just your efficiency that gets positively affected but your food quality as well. Here’s how:
- If your food products need animal meat, source them from free-range animals. This means the animals had no exposure to chemicals and were raised in a stress-free and healthy environment.
- Strive for conservation of resources in your manufacturing plant, so you’re not wasting any more than is needed. These include water and electricity, among others.
Conclusion
While this list doesn’t cover everything a food manufacturing company has to do for efficiency and quality, it should be enough to give you a good start. If it’s been too long since you last did, it’s never a bad idea to do an audit of your own food manufacturing systems and operations. Companies in the business of manufacturing food should always be on top of their strategies to keep their products up-to-date with safety hazards. That way, they’re able to deliver safe food products for consumption to customers.
