The food industry has strict quality requirements for products, packaging and packaging markings e.g. labels. With manual visual inspections unable to maintain outputs of 10,000 finished products per hour which are common in the industry, investing in machine vision has become a realistic option for food manufacturers thanks to more cost-effective devices and advanced software.
At the Kuopio plant in Finland, VIP-Juicemaker (part of Refresco Holding group) has based its growth objectives and competitive strength on effectiveness, high quality and systematic building of know-how, with many ongoing development projects. One of the goals was to improve utilized capacity of product lines by replacing the lines and introducing more automation, particularly machine vision systems.
Portfolio of hundreds of different beverages
VIP-Juicemaker”s proprietary brands constitute 20% of production, with the remainder consisting of several private label products for stores. The plant produces 250 different products in total, which means that a single production line can handle several beverages and packages within a single day. With such high throughput, the company wanted to eliminate unnecessary production breaks and errors to maximise production line output.
Technical manager Antti Käki commented on why the company decided to introduce machine vision: “Our profitability is not based on any tricks; everything we need for production has to be paid for here in Kuopio. Therefore our recipe for success is continuous improvement of processes in terms of quality, safety and cost-effectiveness. The introduction of high-tech solutions is one of the most effective ways to do it.”
New soft drink production line equipped with smart cameras
In the first introduction phase, VIP-Juicemaker worked with Orbis Oy to bring smart cameras onto the new soft drink production line. Specifically designed for the food industry, the Imprint Verifier machine vision system from Orbis uses Cognex In-Sight cameras to ensure error proof production. Imprint Verifier checks for capless and empty bottles at the beginning of the production line to ensure they are removed. It is important to identify and remove the defective bottles at this stage because if any of the sugar-containing juice or soft drinks spill on to the production line, cases or pallets, the spill may contaminate intact packages causing unnecessary product loss, as well as using valuable time for the clean up process.
Further along the production process, a second In-Sight camera monitors the labelling machine to ensure that only correctly labelled bottles are placed on the pallets and ultimately reach the customers. The versatile capabilities of the In-Sight cameras allow consistent and dependable verification of markings, readability checks and packaging quality inspection.
VIP-Juicemaker clearly holds the key to success: production records should be broken once more in 2009.
