Food & Beverage: Reliable Automation for Your Nutrition

Nourishing Food & Beverage

Your Nutrition. Our Packaging.

Food Engineering Case Study on Food Processing

Keith MandachitSep 2, 20241 min read

Authored by Jason Weedin and Keith Mandachit, PE In this publication, Food Engineering publishes a recounting of a global food processor and the automation and controls work we did to […]

AI-based Vision Inspection Systems Make More Informed Decisions

Sean DuganAug 22, 20241 min read

Mechanical Engineer Sean Dugan shares a “vision” for AI and vision systems in Food Engineering magazine… check it out here: AI-based Vison Inspection Systems Make More Informed Decisions | Food […]

Process Automation

Food and beverage production and reduced downtime for manufacturers cannot be underestimated. With ultimate goals toward enhancing productivity, improving product quality, ensuring regulatory compliance, and reducing operational costs, Huffman Engineering has their eyes on the complete process from start to finish.

Our customized automation systems can be integrated with other enterprise systems like Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to streamline operations, improve data flow, and facilitate better decision-making. By analyzing data collected during manufacturing, our automated systems can help equip your teams in identifying inefficiencies and suggesting improvements leading to a reduction in production costs, increased throughput, and enhanced product quality.

Networking & Security

Networking and Security are critical components of control automation systems in food and beverage manufacturing due to the industry’s stringent requirements for reliability, data integrity, and regulatory compliance. Our focus has always been enabling real-time monitoring and control of manufacturing processes from centralized locations. That way, operators and engineers can access live data, make adjustments remotely, and quickly respond to any issues that arise.

Our effective networking and security practices in control automation systems enhance operational efficiency, data integrity, compliance, and overall system reliability. They help food and beverage manufacturers meet regulatory requirements, protect intellectual property, and ensure the consistent quality of their products to ensure the safety of everyone who consumes these products on a daily basis.

Reporting for Compliance

Reporting and compliance in the food and beverage industry are essential for maintaining regulatory standards, ensuring public health, and promoting consumer trust and health. Effective reporting and compliance practices offer several benefits to utilities, regulatory agencies, and the communities they serve.

We pride ourselves on striving to make the communities we live and work in safer for everyone and that includes regulatory compliance, improved operational efficiencies, community transparency, data management and security precautions. In terms of food and beverage that means that we take the weight on any consumable product as seriously as our end user and work with pride toward the end goals of documenting every item for increased security all the way through the production and packaging process.

  • Batch
  • Ammonia Refrigeration
  • Packaging & Palletizing

Huffman Engineering in the food and beverage manufacturing industry specialize in a variety of areas, including process automation, batch and continuous processing, quality control, regulatory compliance, energy management, inventory and supply chain management, data analytics, food safety, ERP and MES integration, process optimization, system scalability, and maintenance. Their expertise helps ensure efficient, reliable, and compliant production processes that meet the unique demands of the food and beverage sector. Familiar with FDA requirements, our engineering team can help make sure your compliance with up to date regulations is on par throughout your project.

Quality Control: Each batch undergoes testing to ensure it meets predefined specifications and quality standards. This includes testing raw materials, in-process samples, and final products.

Consistency: By producing products in batches, manufacturers can control and maintain consistency across products. Consistency is vital for ensuring that each unit of the product performs as intended.

Traceability: Batch numbers provide a way to trace back to specific production runs, raw material sources, and processing conditions. This traceability is essential for investigating quality issues and ensuring accountability.

Huffman Engineering, Inc.’s vast experience within the Food and Beverage Industry and specifically with Ammonia Refrigeration allows us to custom design & program a control system for your specific needs.  We can integrate the low temperature accumulator controls into the existing site-wide refrigeration control systems.

Accumulator equipment: control including vessel level control, interlocks, valve control, proportional feed control and dual pump control with bearing wear monitoring. HEI can provide controls for new equipment that will integrate into the existing refrigeration control system including hard wired manual controls, monitoring and alarming & data collection and trending via the HMI and PLC and HMI based manual controls and automatic operation.

Enhanced Accuracy: built to allow for precise control of temperature, humidity and environmental controls

Quality & Validation: Designed to meet everchanging FDA quality and validity standards across multiple platforms and programmed to collect data on performance and energy use to optimize performance.

Huffman Engineering, Inc. is experienced in serialization and controlling various packaging lines from pharmaceutical bottles and boxes to tortillas and bricks. Our experience extends to filling, sealing, labelling, cartooning, case packing, palletizing and automating the entire packaging system including vision systems and printing such as laser marking to increase throughput and minimize errors on the production line.

Precision Efficiency: Reductions in product defects or inconsistencies in the final products & measurement of overall equipment efficiency (OEE)

Waste Reduction: Monitoring fill levels and seal integrity to minimize waste due to overfilling, underfilling or packaging defects

Batch Analytics: Programmed to generate data on process performance, analyze trends, identify bottlenecks and heighten business intelligence

Have Questions? Like to Request a Quote? Contact Us Below.

Toby Varner, PMP
Industrials Manager

Did you know?
Toby is an avid concert goer.