Article At A Glance
- Food and beverage warehouses face unique storage, handling, and distribution hurdles.
- Automation boosts storage efficiency in the food industry.
- Implement automated temperature controls and use RFID and barcodes for traceability.
- Install automated storage/retrieval systems and adopt inventory management software.
Have you taken advantage of innovative automation technology if you have a food warehouse? At B and B Food Services, we’re the experts in food warehouse challenges and solutions that help you overcome them. When you implement a variety of automation technologies in your warehouse, you’re overcoming all the major challenges involved in running a food warehouse.
Challenges of Food and Beverage Warehouses
A food warehouse encounters significant challenges, from problems with monitoring and controlling temperature to heavy compliance regulations.
Temperature Control and Monitoring
The most enormous challenges warehouses face in temperature control and monitoring include inefficient logging practices, inadequate logging in real-time, and a lack of a system that provides early warning. By solving these issues, a food warehouse can ensure and document that all food products have maintained a safe and appropriate temperature. This can improve its reputation and avoid expensive fines for falling out of compliance.
Product Traceability
If you can track your food products throughout the supply chain, you increase your ability to respond to a health crisis like a mass recall adequately. It can also help you avoid many health concerns arising from inadequate food handling by other companies you work with.
Manual systems for tracing products need to be more efficient and accurate. Implementing automated systems eliminates the human element and gives you peace of mind, knowing your tracking system remains highly accurate.
Wholesale Food Safety In Warehouses
Once the food arrives from the producer, proper storage will keep it fresh until it ships off. Temperature-controlled storage rooms keep fresh produce, meat, and dairy products at appropriate temperatures, and sealed rooms keep shelf-stable foods free of pests and the elements.
While the food waits to ship out, these items are constantly monitored for freshness and any signs of potential spoilage.
Storage Capacity
One of the most prominent food warehouse challenges and solutions concerns storage capacity. With consumers requesting an ever-growing variety of products, warehouses must implement a broader range of SKUs.
You’re limited to a human’s physical restrictions if you rely on manual storage and retrieval solutions. By implementing automated and robotic solutions, you can stack pallets higher, replace them more quickly, and spend less time locating the products.
Inventory Management and Tracking
A growing variety of products requires greater flexibility in managing your inventory tracking and management. Your inventory is the most important aspect of your warehouse, but it remains the factor most vulnerable to complexity, inaccuracy, and inefficiency.
Relying on employees to manage and track your inventory requires significant long-term investment as labor costs rise, minimizing your profits. By incorporating automated inventory systems, you’re increasing efficiency and accuracy and reducing your operating expenses.
Labor Intensity and Safety Concerns
Working in a warehouse involves considerable safety concerns, and the physical aspects of the job can wreak havoc on an employee’s body after decades of service. While the human element remains essential for customer service, quality assurance, and employee management, many warehouses protect their workforce by automating the more dangerous duties.
Automated solutions can lift heavy pallets and perform other tasks that reduce worker health and wellness. This lets you focus your workforce in places where they can make the most difference for your business.
Compliance with Regulations
The Occupational Health and Safety Administration, the Food and Drug Administration, and other governmental bodies impose significant regulations on food warehouses. Incorporating automated systems can help you more easily track compliance issues, eliminate human error in the tasks most vulnerable to safety issues, and alert you to any potential issues so you can resolve them early.
How to Overcome These Challenges with Automation in the Food Industry?
Automation in the food industry can help balance the relationship between food warehouse challenges and solutions. Consider the following automated resources to take your food warehouse to the next level.
Temperature-Controlled Automation Solutions
By implementing automated temperature controls, you can more quickly respond to minute changes that could damage the quality of your inventory. Consider the following options:
- Smart temperature mapping
- Humidity controls
- Real-time reporting and alarms
- Automated protocols and controls for responsive temperature controls
No matter how diverse your inventory, you can implement a variety of climate and temperature-controlled storage systems to keep your food safe.
Additional Read: Latest Trends Shaping The Future Of Wholesale Food Service Distribution
RFID and Barcode Technology for Traceability
Incorporating Radio Frequency Identification Tags and barcodes helps improve both accuracy and efficiency in several ways, such as:
· Greater efficiency: When you use RFID, your employees don’t have to monitor your inventory constantly, freeing them up for other tasks. You can also scan multiple products at once or program the RFID reader to read the barcodes for you automatically.
· No errors: With an RFID reader, you won’t worry about an employee transposing a number as they type or pulling the wrong product.
· Real-time data: An RFID tag collects real-time data about your inventory, shipping volumes, and more. You can use the data to make better decisions about running your business.
Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems
With automated storage and retrieval systems, you take much of the risk, inaccuracy, and inefficiency out of the process. By using automated robotics, you eliminate the need for heavy equipment like forklifts, and your employees won’t have to lift heavy objects that risk injuring them.
These systems also move more efficiently than any human. They often include the following components:
- Cube storage
- Autonomous mobile robots
- Carousels
- Vertical lift modules
- Cranes
- Shuttles
- Loaders of all sizes
What you spend on these systems will save on labor costs and increase efficiency.
Automated Inventory Management Systems
To more completely close the gap between food warehouse challenges and solutions, you must implement an automated inventory management system. For the best results, your inventory management system should include the following components:
- Inventory tracking with comprehensive data about your stock
- Tools for automatic reordering, shipping, purchasing, and receiving
- Controls for ensuring inventory accuracy
- Inventory forecasting and projections
- Barcode and RFID scanning
- Real-time reporting and analytics
You have many options for these systems, and the one you choose will depend on the size of your warehouse and your needs.
Food Warehouse Management Systems
A management system acts as the brain of the entire warehouse. It ties together your inventory management system, storage, shipping, and more. Many systems can even tie into your existing accounting software, like Quickbooks, so you don’t have to change how you do your finances.
Don’t cut corners when it comes to your management system. Even if you’ve successfully incorporated automation into every area of your warehouse, you need a central location where you can manage it. This guarantees you the highest level of efficiency and accuracy.
Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) and Robotics
Robotics and AGVs are an essential component of your storage and retrieval system. This technology includes robots that can perform the following duties:
- Moving items from manufacturing or receiving to the warehouse
- Transporting products between work cells
- Delivering items from warehouse to picking and then to shipping
- Long-haul and end-of-line transportation
- Efficient storage and retrieval
- Trailer loading and unloading
With these systems in place, you’ll rely less on your workforce and experience significant cost savings, increased productivity, and profits.
Compliance Software and Automation
Falling out of compliance is one of the worst things you can do for your food warehouse. By eliminating the human element involved in staying compliant, you gain a higher level of certainty you won’t experience any compliance issues. This software and automation includes the following components:
- Automating procedures that activate quickly in response to compliance issues
- Real-time data and risk assessment for more accurate decision-making
- A centralized dashboard to monitor compliance status and audits
- Constantly verifying compliance and sending alerts when issues arise
Inaccuracy and errors remain a primary cause of compliance violations. Relying on technology eliminates the vast majority of these issues.
Gain a Competitive Edge in Food and Beverage Warehousing with B&B Food Services
Now that you understand the relationship between food warehouse challenges and solutions that include automation, you can start the process of improving your business. At B&B Food Services, we provide innovative, end-to-end solutions for the food service industry. From third-party logistics to temperature control options, we help you handle it all.
To obtain a service quote, call (815) 834-2621.
