How do you keep control of food safety and quality as production changes?
A yoghurt producer in China was receiving complaints about product safety and quality. Customers reported changes in taste and colour and the product was not always consistent from one run to the next.
When the plant was assessed, the problem was traced back to the cleaning stage. The plant’s manually operated cleaning-in-place system, or CIP, was not delivering a consistent cleaning effect.
CIP cleans the internal surfaces of processing equipment between production runs. At this site, operators had to monitor cleaning time, flow rate, temperature and detergent concentration themselves. They also made the required connections manually. If those conditions moved out of range, the effect could carry into the next production run.
For Kevin Liu, Product Manager for Upgrades at Tetra Pak, this is the point producers need to watch.
“Control is number one. We don’t want to find that something is wrong after it has already happened.”
When cleaning problems show up in the product
The yoghurt producer upgraded to a Tetra Pak Automated CIP Station.
That changed how the cleaning cycle was managed. Defined process conditions and automation interlocks were built into the programme instead of relying on operators to monitor them throughout the cycle.
Temperature shows how this works. If a cleaning stage requires 75°C for a set period, the timer starts only once that temperature has been reached. If the temperature drops, the timer pauses and an alert tells the operator to check the cause. Timing resumes when the required temperature is restored.
The plant measured the result after the 2015 automation upgrade. ATP testing, used to assess cleaning effectiveness, showed a 40% improvement in cleaning effect. And consumer complaints fell by 52%.
Those consumer complaints had been linked to changes in taste and colour. Their reduction gave the producer a clear measure of consistency in the finished product.
The impact of CIP upgrades can extend into plant performance too. Across other CIP station upgrade cases in APAC and Europe, energy savings worth around €95,000 per year have been recorded. The cleaning process runs to defined conditions, rather than continuing according to manual timing when those conditions have not been met.
Operators also have a detailed record of every cleaning cycle. The dashboard captures the cleaning parameters and their trends by the second. If a deviation or alarm occurs, the team can see what happened and when.
That record becomes useful when a quality issue needs to be investigated. The team can work from the cleaning data rather than reconstructing events from intermittent manual records. As Kevin explains:
“We still need the operator to check the process. But now the automation system shows the deviations and alarms, and the report gives you the detail afterwards.”
The upgrade addressed a specific weakness in the existing process. The plant did not need to replace the whole production system to change how cleaning was managed.
How pressure protects treated product during heat treatment
Heat treatment brings a different food-safety risk.
Inside a pasteuriser or UHT unit, treated product is kept separate from untreated product or process water as it passes through a heat exchanger. If a leak develops, the direction of that leakage becomes critical.
Differential pressure supervision monitors the pressure on both sides of the heat exchanger. The required pressure relationship is maintained so that untreated product or process water does not enter the treated-product side if a leak occurs.
Pressure transmitters provide the measurements and the automation system responds when critical values are reached. This gives the producer visibility of whether the required pressure relationship is being maintained during production.
Keeping that relationship within its defined limits also reduces the exposure that comes with a food-safety failure. A product recall can carry direct cost and reputational consequences.
For producers supplying the US market, differential pressure supervision can also form part of meeting applicable FDA requirements. In Europe, the same type of pressure control can support relevant legal requirements around product safety.
Heat-exchanger integrity can also be checked without dismantling the equipment. An integrated leakage test pressurises the downstream side of the heating unit for around ten minutes. A leak in the heat exchanger or connecting pipework is then indicated on the operator interface. This avoids the several hours of downtime associated with dismantling the equipment for a traditional leakage test.
Where an upgrade can close a process gap
Assessing the need for an upgrade starts with the process. Identify where food safety or product quality depends on a condition staying within defined limits. Then look at how that condition is checked today and what happens when it drifts.
Production requirements change over time. The process needs to show operators when a critical condition has moved out of range and leave enough evidence to understand what happened.
A targeted upgrade can add the capability that is missing at that point. Catching a deviation early protects the product and it's also what makes the next batch run the way the last one did and not become a wider production problem.
Pick one critical step on your line and look at what it tells you today. If the evidence is thin, talk to us about what an upgrade could add there.