Improving Quality in the
Food & Beverage Industry

In Food and Beverage manufacturing, safety and quality improvement are everything.

Food & Beverage Quality Control

The Food and Beverage industry faces unprecedented regulation as consumers and governments worldwide demand high levels of safety and quality control for food, including “farm-to-fork” and “boat-to-plate” traceability. Major trends are creating quality control challenges for Food and Beverage manufacturers including:

  • An increasingly global Food and Beverage supply chain
  • A growing number of recalls—a fourfold increase in just 5 years
  • Average recall costs of $10 million

In addition to regulatory compliance, quality managers need better real-time visibility—within plants, across plants, and all along their global supply chain to proactively:

  • Reduce risks
  • Improve product consistency
  • Reduce costs
A woman working a manufacturing line ensuring quality food and beverage control

It’s a tall order, but InfinityQS® Statistical Process Control (SPC) quality improvement software provides a single solution for many Food and Beverage companies, from small independent manufacturers to large multinational players.
SPC Software ROI

Snak King finds major ROI with ProFicient: $1 Million in Waste Reduction

Traceability

Government regulations are moving towards requiring traceability as a way to quickly and effectively mitigate risks and ensure a safe food supply for consumers. To comply with the FDA’s Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), USDA regulations, Global Food Safety Initiative standards, the European Commission’s food safety policies, and other mandates, Food and Beverage manufacturers need farm-to-table traceability.

InfinityQS software provides a track-and-trace lot genealogy solution across the entire supply chain, enabling a Food and Beverage manufacturer to:

  • Significantly reduce the time and costs of recalls
  • Take proactive steps to prevent recalls
  • Automate processes, documentation, and reporting for Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP), Sanitary Standard Operating Procedures (SSOP), and regulatory and certification auditing requirements
  • Deliver significant cost savings

Increased visibility—improved food quality and cost control

Paper and spreadsheets can no longer get the job done given today’s need for real-time and accurate quality data that is visible from the production floor to the corner office. Quality managers need visibility within plants and across multiple facilities, often on a global basis, to:

  • Prioritize improvement efforts
  • Compare production-line capability
  • Ensure product consistency
  • Reduce costs
Increased visibility—improved quality control for food

Key capabilities: Food and Beverage Quality Control

InfinityQS SPC solutions provide these capabilities, and with our cloud-based solutions, Food and Beverage manufacturers can gain real-time visibility from their suppliers, co-packers, and third-party producers. Food and Beverage manufacturers using InfinityQS solutions typically see ROI in months, not years, based on improvements in:
  • Net Content Control: Reduce fines from under filling and gain savings from reductions in giveaway due to over filling.
  • Inventory reductions: Real-time supplier monitoring eliminates acceptance sampling and need for large inventories.
  • Product consistency: Within and across plants, real-time monitoring of temperatures, humidity, flow rates, and other factors reduces scrapped product.
Woman examining a bottle for food and beverage quality control

Food & Beverage industry compliance

InfinityQS delivers built-in functionality that helps Food and Beverage manufacturers comply with government regulations and industry standards for food quality and safety.

InfinityQS's Lot Genealogy and Reporting functionality enables organizations to track raw material (ingredients) lot codes throughout Food and Beverage manufacturing operations. For investigation purposes, genealogical "trees" can be created for any lot. These reports allow you to determine:

  • Materials used in the production of a specific finished lot
  • Where incoming raw ingredients were consumed
  • Root causes of nonconforming lots
  • Information critical for responding to product recalls
  • Which final lots were created from incoming lots

Lot Genealogy reports provide a complete view of the incoming/outgoing product relationship with statistical summary information.

Dynamic Scheduler

Dynamic SchedulerYou can specify unique, time-based intervals based on the product, process, or even the workstation. Windows automatically pop up, clearly identifying when data collections are due. If a failure is detected or if no data is collected, the software can automatically send notifications, email administrators, or even force users to specify assignable cause codes and corrective actions.

Watch the video.

InfinityQS solutions boast built-in checklist and workflow alerting features needed to comply with Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) and Sanitation Standard Operating Procedures (SSOP). You can incorporate workflow requirements at the shop floor level, providing automatic data collection prompts to operators. InfinityQS’s real-time Dynamic Scheduler offers visual checklists to operators, reminding them when to perform HACCP, SSOP, and other critical quality checks.

With InfinityQS, audits are easier with instant access to the quality records and electronic documentation needed to demonstrate compliance. Our robust solution can stand up to third-party certification audits such as British Retail Consortium (BRC), Safe Quality Food (SQF), and ISO 22000—or internal audits. Creating reports takes only minutes instead of hours or days, eliminating the need for spreadsheets. 

When enabled, Database Auditing provides full traceability for any modification, edit, or change to any database record. Traceability records are easily viewed in a variety of ways, but they cannot be edited. Whenever a record modification or deletion is attempted, the Reason for Change tracking feature forces users to select a reason for the modification from a drop-down list. Additionally, free-form comments are required. When specified, a Change History and Reason for Change Report can accompany any chart printout.

Manufacturers in the Food and Beverage industries must also comply with filling requirements for Net Content (weight) Control. The Net Content Control feature supports both the U.S. Department of Commerce Maximum Allowable Variation (MAV) and European Union Tolerable Negative Error (TNE) and T1/T2 requirements, plus related Net Content Control reporting to support the needs of global manufacturers. Many Food and Beverage InfinityQS users see fast ROI based solely on reduced “giveaway” or overfilling of product using the Net Content Control functionality.

Consider the Advantages of the Cloud with Dedicated ProFicient on Demand 


InfinityQS’s powerful cloud-based quality solution Dedicated ProFicient on Demand (PoD) provides real-time data analysis and decision making while lowering ownership costs. 

Manufacturers in regulated industries and those that require direct control over software access and features can have all the advantages of the cloud—in a private, unshared environment—with a Dedicated PoD subscription. 

Learn more about the value of a ProFicient on Demand dedicated subscription. 

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Baked-in Success

Since implementing InfinityQSQuality Intelligence, Mid SouthBaking Company has enhanced food safety monitoring and control, streamlined processes, reduced giveaway, and improved operator engagement—dramatically impactingthe company’s bottom line.

The FDA’s Food Safety Modernization Act aims to ensure a safer food supply by shifting the focus to preventing, rather than responding to, contamination. Mid South Baking is tremendously committed to food safety—and InfinityQS enhances their ability to monitor andcontrol their entire manufacturing process.For a company that bakes more than 1 billion buns a year, leveraging modern quality management is essential. After watching shop-floor operators struggle with paper and clipboard data collection,leadership knewthey had to have real-time data to fully understand and optimize their operations. After implementing InfinityQS, Mid South Baking is using real-time data visibility to:

  • Enhance food safety monitoring and control
  • Reduce giveaway by 10% per run
  • Reduce audit time from weeks to minutes
  • Accelerate response times
  • Enable proactive issue prevention
  • Improve operator engagement and empowerment

Download the full case study to learn how Mid South Baking uses real-time SPC to enable proactive prevention.

 

Get the Case Study

The immediate impact that InfinityQS ProFicient had and the awareness it created was tremendous, much more than I ever thought possible. Now we can look at operations as a whole and make big-picture decisions about what should be done going forward. Management is using data to make informed decisions and plan for the future.
There are many advantages to having a computerized system that sometimes, in the fog of having this powerful tool with its many capabilities, one can over look.
It is ultimately easier for the operator. Even with the minimal computer skills many of the
operators had in the beginning, the overwhelming consensus is that they prefer using InfinityQS
over a paper system.
You can read the data rather than having to decipher the writing of 150 different people. The data is at your fingertips.

Take the first step from quality to excellence