Safe food and product at Florence Dairy

Consumers all over the world are increasingly concerned with health and food safety. Globalisation of food production, together with increased demand for greater food safety, has led to legislative demands on food producers.

The general principles of food law now apply to every stage of the supply chain. The new regulations state that every step in the production chain must be traceable, from farm to fork, and this is where advanced automation excels.

Increasingly larger volumes are produced by fewer people. Therefore, it is essential to be able to trust the automation systems that run and control production plants. Modern food production and packaging increasingly relies on automated processing systems to run the plants, collect data and secure food safety.

To tackle ever-increasing demands for strict hygiene, consistent product quality and strict food-handling regulations, modern food production increasingly relies on automated processing systems, to control every step of production, from intake to distribution. At the same time, the food processing industry is speeding up the chase to reduce costs and improve the bottom-line, and needs systems that help it optimise production and resources by pinpointing bottlenecks and improving throughput.

Production tracking in Italy

Tetra Pak is delivering an order for the new traceability concept Tetra PlantMaster Production Tracking, to Centrale del Latte in Florence, Italy. Tetra Pak’s Production Tracking tool is the complete plant traceability solution from reception to distribution that guarantees customers safer production and higher performance, through complete traceability. Its overall aim is to ensure that a product batch and its history can be tracked throughout the production chain.

Production Tracking is an integrated part of Tetra PlantMaster™, for both new and existing plants. The Production Tracking tool achieves complete traceability through structured data acquisition, under which the acquired data is accessible and searchable, backwards and forwards, on both suppliers and customers.

“This tool takes a holistic view of the entire production chain, from intake over processing, filling and packaging all the way to shipping. And every single step is traceable, to reach the very highest level of food safety,” says Mikael Samuelsson, Technical Marketing Manager of Tetra Pak.

The Production Tracking tool is a solution for processing and packaging lines that shows the entire production chain in a traceability tree, on which every batch can be traced, through a tracking report.

“In the UHT world, Production Tracking is the missing link for processing and packaging, which are two separate parts that need to be closely integrated and communicate continuously,” says Renato Fazzi, Factory and Technical Director at the Centrale del Latte dairy in Florence. “Under the conditions present in our dairy, Production Tracking is the tool we use to quickly understand what’s happening in production, so that we can intervene with critical situations."

The web-based Production Tracking application will manage the traceability and logging of both the packaging and processing areas of the Florence dairy.

For further information please contact: Mikael Samuelsson, Tetra Pak Processing Systems