Vision Inspection Technology Can Improve Baking Quality, Safety

Today’s industrial bakery looks much different than it did 40 years ago. Baked goods that were once mixed, proofed, shaped, and decorated manually by the baker are now meticulously produced by automated machines. Several factors compel bakeries toward automation; a growing competitive landscape and diverse consumer demands are only part of the industry-wide drive to innovate and automate.

While much of the baking process is mechanized, most bakeries today still employ manual inspectors as their core line of defense to ensure top-quality baked products that are safe to consume. Despite these production innovations, quality assurance teams face the difficult task of accurately inspecting products for brand-specific traits and detecting unwanted foreign materials at full-line speeds.

Manual inspection was much more reasonable in the bakeries of the past, which produced products at smaller volumes than today’s operations. Access to baking quality assurance experts was also different back then. Even so, relying solely on manual inspection presents more challenges than solutions for a modern industrial bakery.

Vision Inspection Technology

Many companies have started integrating vision inspection technologies to optimize product flow and help streamline final product assessment. Vision inspection systems incorporate high-speed cameras with imaging software and advanced algorithms to directly detect and measure food products for important visual traits on the production line.

Vision inspection technologies are commonly grouped into two inspection categories: final product inspection (FPI) systems and vision process control (VPC) systems.

Many early adopters of vision inspection technology used it to assess final products before packaging, helping them apply objective data to enhance their quality assurance programs. These types of vision inspection systems fall into the FPI category.

Next, bakeries began integrating automated rejection and recirculation capabilities into their FPI system to discard out-of-spec products based on programmed criteria. These criteria range from universal product traits such as overall product size, shape, and color to more detailed or brand-specific features like split height and length of a loaf of bread, topping coverage such as seeds, chocolate chips, and others.

More recently, as bakeries began adopting automated technologies to produce their products at higher volumes, processors began exploring different ways vision inspection could close the loop on their overall process control. While FPI applications could accurately assess product results, these processors needed more information to determine why their results occurred and how to correct them.

This data gap led to the introduction of VPC systems, which are typically installed at key production process stages at any point before packaging. Data visualization and real-time feedback, connected with process machinery, help enable a “smarter” manufacturing line, one in which bakers and operators can make data-driven decisions on process adjustments.

Combining VPC with FPI is how bakeries achieve 100% unbiased online inspection free from human interpretation. Through this integration, bakeries can wholly understand and control the processing capabilities of their production facility to align better with compliance standards.

How Vision Inspection Technology Helps In Baking

While each bakery is unique, there are essential steps in the baking process where vision inspection has helped companies improve quality, consistency, and safety.

Pre-baking inspection. The dough-forming process, for instance, ensures products achieve an ideal final size and shape. Take hole doughnuts, for example, which should have a uniform diameter and center. Many doughnut manufacturers utilize automated shaping equipment to place dough onto a conveyor belt and into individual product lines. Over time, however, this application can run out of alignment. Using a VPC system directly after the shaper can help the production team monitor the uniformity of dough shapers across the belt. The system objectively detects the size and diameter of the overall product and center area. If the dough shape begins to drift outside specifications, the system can alert the operator to any changes in the consistency of the process.