Industry brief

Food & Beverage

Control systems that keep food safe, traceable and running at rate.

What matters

What matters most

Food and drink manufacturers work on tight margins and tighter schedules, under the eye of retailers, auditors and regulators. Their control systems have to hold every critical step within limits, change products quickly without waste, keep lines hygienic and prove, lot by lot, what went into each product and where it went.

Food safety you can prove

Cooking temperatures and other critical control points have to stay within limits on every batch, with alarms that act early and records your auditors and customers will accept.

Traceability and recall

If a lot is ever questioned, you need to trace it back to its ingredients and forward to your customers quickly, from records that are complete and consistent.

Throughput and changeovers

Lines must run at rate, change product with little downtime or waste, and load the right recipe first time, so a product change never becomes a quality incident.

Hygiene and cleaning

Plant is cleaned often and thoroughly. Panels and devices have to survive washdown, and cleaning cycles need to be controlled, verified and recorded like any other process step.

Solutions

Solutions for Food and Beverage

Matrix delivered the software, electrical and SCADA system for a dry pet food facility: pre-conditioning, extrusion, ovens, drum coating, cooling, weighing, sieving and packaging, with SCADA recipe handling, maintenance reporting and MES part tracking that gives every batch a paper trail.

01Ingredient handling, weighing and mixing

02Extrusion, ovens, cooking and cooling

03Coating, sieving and conveying

04Packaging and end-of-line machinery

05Recipe management and SCADA

06MES batch tracking and reporting

How we help

What we bring to Food and Beverage

Production time is precious, so we plan work around your shutdowns and cleaning windows, and prove recipes and sequences against a simulation of the line before anything reaches site. Batch records and reports are designed with your quality team, so the data your audits need is there from day one.

Upgrades

Standards

The standards that shape your project

The standards listed are those most often relevant to control-system work in this sector. Which apply to your project, and how, is agreed with you at specification stage.

Standard	What it covers	How we work with it
BRCGS Global Standard Food Safety	The food safety certification standard that many retailers and brand owners require of their suppliers.	Process control, alarms and records designed around the requirements your site is audited against.
HACCP, ISO 22000 and FSSC 22000	Food safety management built on hazard analysis and critical control points, following the Codex principles.	Critical control points monitored, alarmed and recorded, with the evidence your audits ask for.
Regulation (EC) No 178/2002, Article 18	General food law traceability: knowing your suppliers one step back and your customers one step forward.	Batch and lot tracking that links each product to its ingredients and to where it went.
EHEDG guidelines	Hygienic design of food processing equipment and installations, so that they can be cleaned effectively.	Panels, instruments and cabling specified and placed with cleaning in mind; cleaning cycles controlled and recorded.
ISA-88 (IEC 61512) batch control	Models and terms for batch control: recipes, procedures and the equipment that runs them.	Recipes kept separate from equipment logic, so a new product means a new recipe, not new code.
BS EN ISO 13849-1	Safety-related parts of machine control systems, rated by performance level (PL).	Safety functions designed to the performance level your risk assessment requires, then validated and documented.