Product safety, quality and packaging integrity is crucial to the food and beverage industry. The effects of a recall on a brand can damage its reputation to the extent that it might never recover. Consumers have long memories and a recall of a favorite beverage could easily turn them off from making a purchase of that item when it makes its way back to the store shelves.
Manufacturers and packagers of beverages understand the need for not only a successful, but a high quality deployment of machine vision technology to ensure product safety and to track where the product ultimately ends up for sale. Machine vision and bar code readers help beverage manufactures comply with food and beverage regulations and that helps to enhance consumer confidence in the products they purchase.
Used for allergen management, assembly line verification, quality control and traceability of the items once they leave the packaging facility, the bar code and the bar code reader are powerful partners in the safety and quality of consumer goods.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimate that “48 million people get sick every year, 128,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die from foodborne diseases.” As a way to combat this health threat and to help ensure consumer safety food safety across the supply chain – from farm to table – has been stressed by the Food and Drug Administration and through regulations and legislation on food packaging and labeling.
There is also “food traceability” legislation in place that requires all food packaging and shipping facilities to have systems in place to ensure and provide a trail of information that “follows each food item through the food supply chain.” Ensuring food safety is something manufacturers are always cognizant of and they need to be able to easily identify and locate any of the items it manufactured, packaged and shipped in the event of a recall. Two-dimensional bar code vision system are being deployed as a key component in this food processing and packaging process.
The inclusion of bar codes on prepackaged foods, clothing and other consumer goods helps to enhance public safety and faith in the manufacture and quality of the items they purchase.
Universe Kogaku designs and manufactures optical lenses for industrial, bar code, medical, high tech and electronic applications. Standard and custom lens assemblies for scanners, CCTV, CCD/CMOS, medical imaging, surveillance systems, machine vision and night vision systems are also available from Universe Optics.