An American premium dairy product manufacturer, faced issues with packaging quality—yogurt tubs missing lids, and illegible or absent expiration date codes. Despite a well-staffed inspection team, manual verification couldn't keep pace with production demands. Elementary's solution, a network of automated cameras and sensors, now inspects thousands of tubs daily, ensuring packaging integrity in a food-safe environment, even withstanding nightly washdowns.
A growing brand needs a smart solution that can keep up with production demands
The yogurt brand (owned by a leading beverage company) is built on the principle of superior quality – in their products, animal welfare, customer care, and sustainability efforts. And with growing demand for their nutritious products, the dairy manufacturer strives to ensure that every bottle of milk or tub of yogurt leaves the production line with the same uniform quality, packaging, and labeling. So, when the new lactose-free yogurt facility started noticing recurring defects in lid placement and code printing quality, they needed to find a solution that could keep up with their production demands, accommodate changes in packaging design without expensive retooling and retraining, keep labor costs steady, and work within the company’s strict food safety and cleaning protocols while main-taining precise accuracy through-out.
The production facility already employed experienced quality control inspectors, but with defects slipping through the cracks, it became clear that sample inspections were not going to be sufficient going forward, and hiring more quality personnel was both cost-prohibitive and inefficient as a long-term solution for a high-volume production line.
Traditional machine vision solutions were also ruled out – with several flavors being produced at once and frequent updates to the packaging to keep the design fresh and engaging, most automated quality systems couldn’t recognize the changes and would need to be constantly updated and retrained. What’s more, the product’s expiration date code wasn’t always printed in the exact location on the lid. This deviation was too difficult to recognize for most traditional machine vision inspection solutions, so the manufacturer turned to the next-generation quality automation.
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