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Bakery

Views: 2276

Are HEPA Filters the Most Valuable Choice for Your Plant?

Because billions of particles lace unconditioned air with dust, dirt, bacteria and pathogens, your plant’s air filters are crucial to preventing contamination and ensuring food safety. But when it comes to filtration, more isn’t necessarily better. This is especially true with high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters. While HEPA filters may be a necessity for some plant environments, they could be expensive overkill for others.

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Views: 1106

Why Your Expansion Plan Needs Supply Chain Modeling

As the food processing industry continues to flourish, many manufacturers are faced with the need to increase capacity. Whether it’s adding a new process line, building an additional plant or expanding an existing facility, conducting a supply chain analysis in partnership with your design team can lead to better decision-making and more efficient capital expenditures.

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Views: 958

Eight Critical Steps in Water Treatment To Protect Your Products and Equipment

Whether you’re designing a new food processing plant or upgrading an existing facility, determining necessary upfront water treatment is a critical step in protecting and maintaining your plant’s systems. Many plants forgo thorough analysis resulting in poorly or untreated water that can lead to scale and bacterial buildup on equipment. Stellar often partners with water treatment professionals such as Southern Waters Company, Inc. to effectively manage clients’ clean water requirements.

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Views: 798

A Conversation With Powerit Solutions® About Energy Management Technology

I recently sat down with Jack Perkins, Director of Channel Development for Powerit Solutions®, to discuss ways the food and beverage industry can benefit from energy management technology. Stellar often partners with energy experts such as Powerit Solutions to provide clients with a full range of tools to increase energy efficiency.

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Views: 1231

Automate These Three Processes to Increase Throughput

As product lines become more diverse due to increased demand in specialty ingredients in multiple sized packages with private labeling, manual processes become both costly and time consuming. Many food processing plant managers are recognizing the benefits of automating previously manual processes to increase production and reduce labor costs.

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Views: 2351

Tips for Managing Multiple SKUs to Meet Customer Demands

The food and beverage industry today is all about consumer demand and meeting preferences for tastes, specialty ingredients and preparations (such as non-GMO, Kosher and gluten-free), flexible packaging, and convenient serving sizes.

Take the coffee industry for example: One customer wants a special blend in a light roast with a medium grind. Another customer wants a different blend in a dark roast with a fine grind. You can do the math and see the exponential impact of the options. Every variation creates a unique SKU for the coffee producer.

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Views: 676

Process Solutions For Adding Gluten-free to Your Product Mix

Ingredient changes and process design solutions are much easier to engineer in a new plant than in an existing one. Plants that work with allergen products can design dedicated process lines, separate storage areas and well-planned cleaning processes to avoid any cross-contamination issues. Yet with gluten-free products being relatively new on the scene, retrofitting an existing plant to incorporate this allergen into the current product mix can be challenging.

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Views: 2092

Sanitary Process Installation: What to Ask When Selecting a Subcontractor

Equipment manufacturers play a key role in the food safety program of a food processing plant, ensuring that equipment is designed and built to meet stringent sanitary requirements. Plant owners often spend significant time and money to acquire the right equipment with the proper sanitary construction. Yet once that equipment is designed and delivered, the next critical step is ensuring that it’s installed properly, within those same sanitary standards. If you do not carefully screen installation subcontractors, you could put your plant at risk of a food safety issue.

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Views: 2273

New Trends in Sanitary Equipment Design are Improving Food Safety Standards

As food safety regulatory requirements become more stringent, equipment manufacturers are stepping up to the plate and increasing the role they play in the industry. The American Meat Institute’s (AMI) 10 sanitary design principles offer baseline standards for equipment design, yet many suppliers are going above and beyond these standards by offering improved surfaces, cleaning chemicals, and construction processes.

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