Beverage
This industry group comprises establishments primarily engaged in manufacturing soft drinks and ice; purifying and bottling water; and manufacturing brewery, winery, and distillery products.
Assembly Line
Dynamic fermentation and the making of non-alcoholic beers
Targeted adjustments to recirculation and sedimentation processes in the fermentation tank make it possible to achieve high quality in the beers produced and increase the efficiency of individual processes. Steinecker offers the Poseidon recirculation unit for precisely such dynamic fermentation. And now it’s being tested for yet another application: the production of non-alcoholic beers using crabtree-negative yeasts.
In order to use its Poseidon recirculation unit with crabtree-negative yeasts, Steinecker developed a variant featuring an integrated aeration system and oxygen sensor. Here, too, recirculation keeps the yeast in a more homogeneous suspension in the beer, which in turn improves flavor development and speeds maturation. Even more important, though, is its use for aerating the tank: During the maturation process, Poseidon recirculates the wort continuously and maintains a consistent oxygen content of between 1.0 and 1.5 parts per million (ppm). To develop the desired aroma profile, it is important that a high temperature be maintained for as long as possible – all the while in an aerobic environment. In trials conducted in the Steinecker Technology Center in collaboration with Novenesis, a producer of crabtree-negative NEER yeasts, these conditions could be maintained for well over 20 hours using Poseidon. In the end, these tests produced fully flavored beer containing 0 percent alcohol in just two days’ time.
High-speed canning line setting new benchmarks
The latest investment project is also a turnkey line, this time for filling cans. Rated at 120,000 cans an hour, it sets a new speed record for Yanjing because none of the other lines at any of its over 30 facilities runs faster.
The company wants to assure long-term viability not only for its machine technology but for its IT infrastructure as well. That is why it will here use the SitePilot Line Diagnostics software for the first time in the Yanjing Group. This system monitors all data of each individual machine and the entire line, providing Yanjing with all quality-, cost- and performance-related parameters of its production operation and thus ensuring enhanced levels of transparency.
The (silent) killer application of 3D printing is packaging your food
Despite numerous efforts and great expectations in futuristic segments such as alternative meat, chocolate and pasta, food 3D printing has not fully delivered on its initial promises. However, the food industry is also one of the biggest (and quietest) implementation areas for 3D printing. Many 3D printer manufacturers have tried to yell it out to the world that 3D printing can revolutionize the food and beverage industries, but many case studies went unnoticed. Unlike direct 3D printing of food products, the additive manufacturing of food and beverage packaging machinery parts is not as appetizing to the wider public as 3D printed chocolate or a pasta dish but it may be one of the killer applications that drive AM adoption.
The benefits of using 3D printing to make food & beverage industry machinery work better are self-evident. For one, food processing machines are highly complex mechanical assemblies that can have well over 2,000 components, many of which have to be stored in inventory and, as a result, cannot be modified easily once they are in production. Many of these parts are complex. Or complexity can be added to a part in order to simplify the machine’s work. This can be done with both metal and polymers, using various different processes and even a wide range of differently priced machines, from professional-level Formlabs and Ultimakers to industrial-level metal PBF and metal binder jetting systems.
Bavarian brew: Tapping into innovation with wastewater recycling
In an innovative move to tackle Europe’s escalating water scarcity, global water technology leader Xylem, announced the launch of Reuse Brew. This unique Bavarian beer, crafted from high-quality treated wastewater, marks a significant advancement in water recycling technologies and offers a sustainable solution to the increasing challenges posed by climate change.
The development of Reuse Brew is the culmination of a partnership between the Chair of Brewery and Beverage Technology at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the Chair of Urban Water Systems Engineering at TUM, the city of Weissenburg in Bavaria, and Xylem. This collaboration showcases the transformative potential of advanced water treatment technologies in producing a palatable beer, promoting sustainable water management practices across Europe.
Coca-Cola Bottlers Japan Inc.－Akashi Mega DC
Technical tour to Europe’s largest solar industrial heat plant at Heineken Spain
The HEINEKEN Company in Spain has officially launched the largest industrial solar thermal plant in the world using ‘Fresnel’ technology, at its brewery site in Valencia. The park is composed of highly reflective mirrors that use sunlight to heat water, following the sun’s path. All light is concentrated onto a tube that heats the water in the circuit up to an exceptional 220 degrees Celsius, generating the necessary steam for making beer. With this solar thermal plant, almost half of the energy used to produce beer in Valencia will be renewable - a crucial step towards having all four of our breweries in Spain run on 100% renewable energy.
AI vision for print quality inspection on bottles
Bell’s Brewery: The Advanced Manufacturing of Beer With a Craft Brewing Spirit
The hiss of steam, hum of churning machines, and a fragrant aroma of hops provides the greeting to Bell’s Brewery production facility in Comstock, MI. The complex, which spans 200,000 square feet, brews more than 20 beers for distribution as the national production backbone of the Bell’s brand.
“Once we got the robot arm in place we were able to add a second shift as a result of putting this automation in. Compared to what people’s mindsets are that you take jobs away, we actually sped up our production and were able to add more jobs to our workforce.” On the digital side of automation, Sippel said he could run most of the brewery on his phone while lying on the couch at home. “In a lot of ways Automation can make it feel like you are playing [a video game like] Sim Brewer,” Sippel said. “It is very easy to forget you are controlling very real processes that can be really dangerous.” Operating with safety in mind in the digital realm is key, but it is also important to be present in the room, he added. “You still need to have physical eyes and ears in the process.”
Bell’s Comstock facility is more than meets the eye. The brewery features an 85-ton geothermal field installed eight feet beneath its two-acre hop yard, using glycol filled tubes to exchange heat and offset HVAC demand in the brewery’s offices. Additionally, the LED lights installed at the brewery conserve 180,000 kWh of electricity per year in comparison to incandescent bulbs— that’s enough electricity to power 22 homes in one year.
How Smart Glasses Helped a Manufacturer Through the Pandemic
How does an expert in one facility guide an engineer halfway across the country through implementing a new technology? Food and beverage packaging manufacturer Crown Holdings found an innovative answer during the pandemic, when its employees couldn’t travel freely: it equipped them with smart glasses.
“When the pandemic started, we were trying to coordinate commissioning activities through email and WhatsApp messaging,” said Crown Holdings Project Industrial Engineer Leon Azzi. “Tasks that normally took two to three days were taking weeks.” But with the glasses, “[The workers] could share with each other the PLC (programmable logic controllers) electrical diagrams and pictures using the glasses viewer, and the remote experts could point them to areas to focus on in real time,” said Crown Holdings Digital Optimization Team Head Alberto Rodriguez.
Atwater brews beer developed by AI
Atwater Brewery this week tapped its Artificial Intelligence IPA, an India Pale Ale whose recipe was developed by a popular new AI chatbot that’s turning heads for its intelligent responses to questions or prompts.
“It’s cool for us, as a Detroit brewery, in a city that’s known for innovation, to develop something so interesting for our beer,” says Katy McBrady, Atwater’s president, adding that AI can only get the beer so far. “There is no replica for our creative brewers and the human touch you need to brew craft beer.”
Plastic Bottles Defect Inspection Using Omron FH Vision System with AI
Intelligent Inspection – Deep Learning powered Machine vision
Fresh milk and cream: increasing capacities for returnable bottles
Fresh milk produced using traditional methods is the cream of the crop. The Berchtesgadener Land dairy fills this precious commodity in glass bottles. To meet the soaring demand for milk in returnable bottles, the cooperative has replaced its returnable-glass line, which fills organic and mountain farmers’ milk and cream.
The most important requirement for the new line was quality, both in regard to the machines and systems and the products made on them. “Production lines for traditional fresh milk must always give reliable service. We don’t have time for long maintenance routines,” emphasises Althammer. The milk is delivered to the dairy every day and must be dispatched fast, in order to guarantee retailers a minimum shelf life in the cold chain of eight days. What’s more, complying with stringent cleanliness standards in production is the top priority for filling this unsterilised milk. Germs carried in from outside result in faster milk spoilage, meaning the required shelf life would then not be met. When filling into returnable bottles, moreover, contaminated empties must not be allowed to enter the filling zone. That entails stringent requirements for the bottle washer, the filler and overall hygiene standards for the line.
How to Calculate Production Line Efficiency and Increase Your Throughput
As the filler is usually the most expensive machine on the line, we are in business and can move forward on ways to keep it running. We will aim to get the line’s throughput as close to the 167 bottles per minute (BPM) figure as possible.
Accumulation systems are designed to create buffers when a machine goes down to prevent having to shut down the entire line. Remember, we want to keep the constraint running as much as possible. By adding one or more accumulators on the line, you can avoid shutting down the constraint as you get your other machines back up. This can get the line’s throughput as close to the constraint’s maximum throughput as possible. Again, we will use our example to show you what happens when adding accumulation.
Heineken’s Event-Driven Connectivity Strategy
To understand the scope of this connectivity project, it’s important to realize that Heineken runs more than 3,500 applications globally, connecting them with more than 5,000 interfaces. ERP systems in use across the company include SAP, Oracle’s JD Edwards, and Microsoft Dynamics, as well as the Hybris and Virto e-commerce platforms, Salesforce customer relationship management, and various manufacturing execution and invoicing systems.
Groeneweg adds that, with its new event-driven system in place, Heineken can now deploy scalable “plug-and-play” technologies quickly to take advantage of timely business insights at scale. To explain this, Groeneweg offers an example involving the introduction of a new global invoice management application. Before the implementation of Heineken’s event-driven system, multiple point-to-point integrations would need to be built to embed the new application into the company’s IT landscape. “We would have to connect it to at least 20 applications to get master data, ERP data, customer data, etc.,” says Groeneweg. “With the event-driven approach, we just point the chatbot to the right topics and queues where the data is already available from all the source systems it needs to access. No integration work is required at all.”
Underground beer line doesn’t let a drop go to waste
3D printing hits the spot: How PepsiCo is using AM to produce drink bottle tooling
Among those tools and capabilities is PepsiCo’s patented Modular Mold Set, which is compatible with most standard blow moulders and comprises an aluminium shell, dental stone, and 3D printed inserts for various bottle designs from 100ml to 3L. “The Modular Mold Set is a means for us to be able to very rapidly and quickly generate a customised mould that we can then utilise in our lab-scale or Pilot Plant scale stretch blow moulding equipment,” Rodriguez told TCT.
Previously, to get functional mould samples, PepsiCo would contract an external service provider who would leverage a subtractive manufacturing technique – CNC or EDM, depending on the complexity – and return the tool within two-to-four weeks at a typical cost of up to 10,000 USD.
Nokia creates the perfect pint with 5G technology
Nokia and the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) have announced the successful operation of the world’s first private wireless and 5G connected digital microbrewery. The state-of-the-art facility forms part of UTS’s Industry 4.0 research site and enables thirsty researchers to perfect the art of brewing in the twenty-first century using digital automation.
Utilizing a cloud-based digital twin of an actual brewery to optimize the brewing process, UTS’s Industry 4.0 Nano-Brewery, is part of its new Advanced Manufacturing and Industrial Data Science testbed developed at the UTS Tech Lab. The Nano-Brewery forms part of an international production network, with an identical physical twin set up at TU Dortmund University in Germany. The 5G connected brewery captures and monitors production data at every step of the brewing process and uses this data, together with data from the physical twin in Dortmund and a digital twin in the cloud, to optimize the process.
Using machine learning techniques in wine quality testing
The Profiling capability from Thermo Scientific™ SampleManager™ LIMS software provides an innovative way for laboratories to predict test results using historical data and novel machine learning (ML)-based techniques. For example, a food and beverage company might apply the Profiling capability to enable supervised learning in the food production process. In this case, SampleManager LIMS would use historical data to gain an understanding of the critical variables that determine whether a product is safe for consumers. This holistic approach considers not only the values of the individual critical variables themselves, but also the relationships between them. If a sample were to be flagged as failing, the system would alert stakeholders in advance to issue adjustments or investigations to avoid any risk to finished products.
In a wine production facility, the result of the “Quality Test” is of utmost importance. The laboratory has great flexibility and control over the testing process, so they could use the Profiling capability to redefine the order of the standard tests conducted to a wine sample.
Automated by B&R - Bottle Unscrambler by Seiko Japan
Packaging Solutions for the Wine Industry
In a new video, we show how ProMach product brands, Axon, Fogg, I.D. Technology, P.E. Labellers, Roberts PolyPro, and Zalkin provide solutions to meet the demands of packaging in the wine industry. Whether your line requires modularity, high-performing machines to keep up with fast productions speeds, reliable equipment to sustain high speeds, fast changeovers, and more, a ProMach product brand can deliver custom packaging machinery from filling, capping, labeling, and coding to meet your demands.
Digital Transformation in the Beverage Manufacturing and Bottling
How the Maker's Mark Distillery Produces 24 Million Bottles of Bourbon per Year
STM 2.0 Brewery Install w/ Dakota & Gary
How SparkCognition Improved Production Efficiency for a Beverage Manufacturer
We developed seven new deep learning models to detect anomalies in resource consumption, machine status/health, and overall efficiency. (As always with a Total Plant solution, these models were tailored to the specific data, technical context, and business goals and strategies of the client.)
Once developed, the models were deployed into our AI platform for execution and KPI-driven reporting. Another key new function we delivered: predictive analysis, to anticipate problems before they occur, based on patterns detected in current and historical data, and notify the beverage manufacturer in time to take preventative action.
Finally, the results of the AI-powered analysis were delivered via a configurable dashboard that provides at-a-glance insight into the plant’s efficiency, including new KPIs reflecting water usage, water balance, power consumption, heat generation, and waste levels. This information can also now be streamed whenever, wherever, and to whomever the manufacturer requires, now or in the future.
Fully automated end-of-line test bench for BMW eDrive
Cloud-based app for micro-breweries
When the yeast consumes the sugar to produce alcohol: That’s when the flavour is developed. It’s when beer becomes beer. Australian craft brewers are passionate about brewing, not industrial operational technology, yet Leonie Wong and Rex Chen from the MindSphere team still managed to make the data work for them; they want to always land the perfect brew and waste not a single drop.
In this market, Deacam, an Australian original equipment manufacturer (OEM), which provides automated brewing equipment and solutions to microbreweries, was looking to differentiate itself. Leonie Wong, responsible for Vertical Sales for Food & Beverage for Siemens Australia, and Solution Architect Rex Chen met with Deacam and their customers, the microbreweries themselves.