Packaged Food Industry: Wake up, Your Complex, Costly Equipment Extends Lead Times—and Hides Pathogens

Abstract

Abstract This article advocates major changes in the way the packaged foods industry equips and operates its factories: minimal numbers of complex high-cost, high-maintenance, multipurpose production lines that dump massive quantities of goods into distribution channels well out of sync with customer demand. It calls instead for multiple low-cost, low-maintenance, easy-to-clean and set-up product-focused lines or cells—a formula long known in the lean/JIT production community. This configuration is alternatively labeled concurrent production (CP) in that it turns out many different product types concurrently. The CP way of engineering the production process enhances competitiveness by reducing outsized distribution inventories and getting the right mix of goods to customer entities with much shorter lead times, and in packaged foods at the same time reduces high exposure to pathogens. The economic benefits of the simple-equipment formula—“right-sized” for flow opposed to “monuments” and batch production—are established in the literature. Applications are found in diverse sectors, from metalworking and electrical to airplanes. However, CP is largely unrecognized in consumer-packaged goods in general—and hardly at all in packaged foods and beverages—a travesty inasmuch as the CP configuration greatly reduces frequency and difficulties that accompany equipment changeovers and clean-outs, which are dominant havens for pathogen incursions.