The biggest challenges in food and beverage manufacturing
Food safety, traceability, short shelf lives, recipe variability and labour: the pressures on F&B manufacturers and where shopfloor systems help.
Key Challenges in Food & Beverage Manufacturing: Staying Ahead in a Dynamic Industry
The Food & Beverage (F&B) sector is a fascinating but incredibly demanding landscape. Beyond the constant innovation to create new, delicious products, F&B manufacturers are continually wrestling with a unique set of operational hurdles. To remain competitive, profitable, and ensure sustained growth, businesses must effectively manage several core challenges that directly impact their day-to-day operations and long-term viability.
Understanding the Core Hurdles:
Food Safety & Quality: The Absolute Priority
This is, without a doubt, paramount. In F&B, any lapse in food safety or quality can lead to immediate and severe consequences. A single product recall can not only incur massive financial costs from withdrawn goods but, more damagingly, irrevocably tarnish a brand's reputation and, most critically, pose significant health risks to consumers.
Maintaining strict control and adherence to evolving standards – from the moment raw ingredients arrive, through every step of processing, to the final packaged product – isn't just good practice; it's the foundation of consumer trust. This includes managing allergens, preventing cross-contamination, and ensuring accurate labelling, all whilst adhering to industry regulations.
Cost & Waste Optimisation: Protecting the Bottom Line
With global markets influencing ingredient prices and energy costs, alongside shifts in consumer demands and seasonaility, optimising every aspect of production is crucial. In F&B, waste isn't just about wasted materials; it includes spoilage of perishable goods, inefficient use of energy in cooling or heating, over-production that leads to expired stock, and rework of batches that don't meet specification. for example - taste, appearance, or colour.
Finding ways to minimise material 'give-away' in packaging, reduce scrap rates for expensive raw materials, blend more effectively, and enhance overall efficiency directly impacts profitability and sustainability goals.
Workforce Management & Skills Gap: People Power
Attracting, retaining, and effectively onboarding skilled labour for the factory floor is an ongoing difficulty across manufacturing, and F&B is no exception. The complexity of modern machinery, coupled with the precision required for food production, demands a knowledgeable workforce who are following the right processes in the right way, every time. Unfortunately, reliance on outdated, paper-based systems for training, documentation, and data capture can prevent quick onboarding of new hires and hinder existing operators from consistently following the correct processes. This can lead to increased errors, reduced productivity, and increased costs.
Supply Chain Resilience & Traceability: Navigating Global Complexity
The F&B supply chain is inherently complex and often global. Geopolitical events, climate impacts, and sudden shifts in demand can cause unexpected disruptions to the availability of crucial ingredients or packaging materials. Beyond ingredient availability, achieving clear visibility across the entire supply chain and maintaining immediate, end-to-end traceability of all components – from farm to fork – is vital.
This enables mitigation of risks, ensures product authenticity, helps combat food fraud (a term I only learnt recently), and facilitates swift, targeted responses in the event of a quality issue or recall.
How Technology Steps Up: The Power of MES/MOM
Enhance Quality & Safety:
A MES/MOM system drives quality by providing real-time monitoring of critical process parameters (like temperature, pressure, cooking times), automating data collection, and enforcing Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) digitally. This precise control helps to reduce human error, ensure consistent product quality, precisely track batches from raw material receipt to finished goods, and guarantee consistent compliance with stringent food safety regulations.
Reduce Costs & Waste:
MES/MOM solutions provide the insights needed to optimise production runs, ensuring you're making exactly what's needed, when it's needed. They help reduce scrap for expensive raw materials by tightly controlling usage and identifying deviations early. Features like accurate portioning and 'give-away' control for packed goods ensure valuable product isn't wasted, directly impacting material costs and improving overall yield. By reducing rework and improving first-pass quality, overall operational expenditure drops.
Improve Operational Efficiency:
MES/MOM streamlines workflows, replacing cumbersome paper records with digital work instructions and real-time data input. This provides clear, digital guidance for operators, making complex machinery setups and recipe execution simpler. Operators no longer have to look through paper manuals and instructions - the right information is provided digitally at the right time.By improving overall operational visibility and control, MES/MOM helps to mitigate the impact of labour shortages by enabling more efficient use of existing staff and simplifying the onboarding process for new team members. Adoption (particularly for younger generations) is increased when applications are visually appealing, intuitive, and mobile friendly.
Traceability and Supply Chain:
MES/MOM systems are critical for achieving true end-to-end traceability. They capture detailed records of every ingredient, every process step, and every finished batch. This allows for instant forward and backward traceability, meaning if a quality issue arises, you can pinpoint affected products in minutes, not hours, dramatically reducing the scope and cost of potential recalls. The accuracy and level of detail means that fewer batches are recalled.
These systems also provide valuable real-time data on inventory and production status, feeding into better supply chain planning and enabling rapid responses to unexpected disruptions.
Yield, give-away and recipe control
In food and beverage, yield from raw materials is often the number one profit driver. Small improvements here can have a huge return.
Manual processes introduce variability and waste: inconsistent weighing, over-filling to stay safe, recipes adjusted by experience rather than data. MES/MOM can control recipe execution, manage ingredient substitutions, enforce shelf-life and FIFO rules, and show give-away by line, shift and product in real time.
If you're about to start a project, read The biggest barriers to MES success in food manufacturing first.
Summary
Ultimately, a strong MES/MOM foundation is fundamental to building a resilient, compliant, and profitable Food & Beverage operation that consistently earns and maintains consumer trust. It's about moving from reactive problem-solving to proactive, data-driven excellence.
Matt Barber
VP & General Manager for MES at Infor. Started as an MES developer, then ran projects, solution design and product. Writes about the smart factory, shopfloor AI and the MES/MOM foundations underneath them.
