Food & Beverage

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The committee is charged with providing recommendations on microbiological criteria that indicate whether foods have been adequately and appropriately processed.

The report, titled “Automation Expenditures for Food and Beverage Worldwide Outlook,” examines the market for automation products and systems in food and beverage products and ingredients manufacturing.

Poultry meat is the cause of the most fatalities occurring as a result of foodborne illnesses, according to figures released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), which aims to improve food safety regulations and prevent foodborne illnesses, applies both to domestic and imported production and covers farmers and food processing companies.

The demand for food processing machinery is growing and sales are predicted to increase by 7.3 percent on a global scale over five years, reaching a total value of $53.3 billion.

Convenience and light weight are the main reasons why both huge national brands and smaller private companies are opting for flexible packaging for all types of food products, ranging from ready-to-drink cocktails to fruit chips.

Inline rotor/stator mixers are utilized throughout the process industries for high shear processing of flowable liquid applications. They can be operated in a truly continuous mode wherein feed streams are metered into the mixer, but more commonly, inline rotor/stator devices are set up for recirculation.

PepsiCo is removing brominated vegetable oil (BVO), a bromine-containing chemical that is found in flame retardants, from its Gatorade drinks in response to consumer concerns.

A large portion of food-industry mixing operations are still accomplished by relatively simple single-shaft mixers such as propellers, pitched-blade turbines, impellers and anchor stirrers. Increasingly, however, food manufacturers are seeing the benefits of “one-pot processing,” especially when it comes to high-solids viscous applications that conventional mixers can’t handle.

International production of donuts could be radically changed with the development of a method that reduces fat content by 40 percent, saturated fat content by 45 percent and calorie count by 20 percent.