Quality Assurance: For Beverage Manufacturers

The cost of defective products can be high: a recall is expensive, and the damage to brand integrity can be catastrophic. In the competitive beverage market, consistent product presentation keeps customers from abandoning the brand. As production speeds increase, the accuracy of manual inspection decreases; meanwhile, the cost of manual inspection continues to increase. As a result, beverage and bottling manufacturers are increasingly turning to vision inspection systems in order to monitor the quality and security of their products.

The global beverage manufacturing and bottling industry is one of the largest and most efficient manufacturing processes in the world. Advances in production technology have allowed the rate of production in the beverage industry to expand rapidly, driving manufacturers to keep pace with demand. This in turn has made the beverage market more competitive. Beverage manufacturers in some market categories are forced to fight for a smaller market, while manufacturers in other categories scramble to claim as many new customers as they can before the new category becomes saturated.

In a tightly-contested market, keeping customers becomes, for some market categories, a larger priority than attracting new ones. The key to retaining customers is consistency—consumers will not continue to buy products if the fill levels vary from bottle to bottle, or the labels are sloppily applied. Realizing this, beverage manufacturers have tightened their quality control requirements. In order to meet these new standards while still maintaining rapid production speeds, many beverage manufacturers are turning to machine vision inspection as the best method to maintain package quality.

In addition to the competitive benefits that a vision inspection system can bring, a vision inspection system will also help beverage manufacturers remain compliant to industry and government safety standards. A true turnkey vision inspection solution will not just inspect cosmetic features such as label position and expiration date, it will also perform inspections for chipped tops, debris in the bottle prior to filling, improperly applied caps and fill levels—all defects that if discovered on retailer shelves can lead to product recalls, fines and government sanctions.