Significant Applications of AI In Food Processing and Safety

The food industry is benefitting greatly from the latest advancements in Artificial Intelligence(AI), which is doing everything from helping to sort foods, maintaining top-notch health and safety compliances, developing new products, and bolstering the supply chain. Food safety testing often involves sorting a large quantity of feedstock and careful inspection. Here is how AI can be used in food safety testing and processing.

Improved Sorting

Among manufacturing facilities, one roadblock that is relatively unique to food safety testing is that the feedstock is not uniform. A food plant might need to sort millions of food items based on size, shape, or color. Now a significant amount of that sorting has been automated with the help of AI, which reduced labor costs, increases in speed, and improved yields.

• Improved Food Safety Compliance

AI-enabled cameras in the kitchen or food facility watch to make sure that individuals are wearing masks or hair protection when required by safety regulations. Violations can be caught and corrected in near real-time. Also, AI object recognition can fight IP privacy to automatic safety testing.

• Improved Cleaning

The use of artificially intelligent sensor systems would reduce the amount of time it takes to clean equipment, which saves money on water, energy, and time. According to reports, 30 percent of energy and water use at food manufacturing facilities. Artificially intelligent sensor systems could reduce cleaning times up to 50 percent, allowing less downtime and more productivity.

• Cleaning Processing Equipment

Another important element of maintaining health standards is with advanced processes that help to clean equipment. Researchers are developing a system that uses AI to reduce cleaning time and resources, potentially saving high costs.

The applications of AI in the food industry are: 

Managing the food supply chain:

The traditional food supply chain only include the food processing and packaging units, but today supply chains are getting more expansive by adding more of the food making process. Modern supply chain consisting of different units controlled by various stakeholders having different objectives. This requires constant monitoring of the operations at each stage, which can be done using AI. AI-powered supply chain management systems monitor and control the activities throughout the supply chain making use of wireless communications and remotely controllable technologies.

Safe Transit:

AI can be used to control the conditions in which food is transported. Each food products must be carried under favorable conditions of temperature and humidity. The storage and transit conditions must be monitored to ensure that these food products reach the processing in the best of condition. Using AI integrated with IoT can help in automatically controlling these conditions and ensures that food products will always reach the destination.

Maintaining processing Equipment:

Any malfunctioning in food processing systems can potentially mean stopping the entire production process. Minor issues in systems can cause stoppage and thus leading to wastage of labor, time and materials. Hence it is crucial to maintain ideal working condition for which AI can be used. It can give rise to predictive maintenance by constantly monitoring equipment health and initiate maintenance activities.

Food Processing:

Food processing traditionally involves human labor, and where ever human labor required the total hygiene cannot be guaranteed. Automating as much of processes can act as a solution for this by preserving complete hygiene and quality. Robotic equipment powered by AI reduces the complexity of these process.

Food Delivery:

Use of AI is a universal enabler in food delivery as they automate the marketing efforts by studying individual customer behavior to identify their interests and preferences. This enables to automate the activities involved in the ordering, dispatching, and billing processes to maximize the efficiency in these areas.

AI’s role in the food industry is becoming increasingly important due to its ability to help save food, improve hygiene, and clean processing equipment more quickly.

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AI In Food Processing and Safety: 4 Significant Applications