Food manufacturing companies need to ensure that their products are of the highest quality. For this, food and beverage companies must develop and implement quality assurance strategies like case code reading. Our blog explains how food and beverage case code reading is achieved.
What is Food and Beverage case code reading?
Food and beverage case code reading is a universal language for identifying food and beverage products, ingredients, and packaging. It allows companies to quickly, efficiently, and accurately track and trace a product as it passes through its life cycle.
Food and beverage case codes can help keep your operation running smoothly by streamlining stocking process. A food and beverage case code is a product’s unique ID generated by its manufacturer. There are various food and beverage case code schemes that have been created over years.
They are used to identify products from:
- Particular vendors.
- Cases and pallets of finished goods in a manufacturing process.
- Work in progress on a factory floor.
- Raw materials received from vendors.
Including your food and beverage product data in the case code solution is crucial because food and beverages have different weights, sizes, and requirements.
Food and beverage companies specialize in packaging designs for seasonal offerings, holidays, new product introductions, short-term promotions, and market segments. These products have specific tracking codes on their cases, which can be read to manage inventory.
Errors in inventory codes can lead to various problems for a retailer, including incorrect deliveries and inadequate supplies of required products.
What are the challenges?
1. To read printed characters on packed foods of different sizes.
2. OCR (Optical Character Recognition)programs must be customized for each case background.
3. Due to changes in background programming, keeping up with these changes leads to significant delays and errors.
4. Unreadable codes cause supply chain problems.
Solution
AI-based image recognition solution is an effective way to read printed codes on challenging surfaces. This solution makes setting up and deploying OCR (optical character recognition) capabilities easy due to a library of pre-trained fonts. This model can recognize text independent of background, even if backgrounds are new to model. The OCR solution can process texts in any background so we get all data from packed foods and beverages in real-time. This helps the production line to never stop even if there are any changes in product packaging.
