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Precautionary measures & advanced technologies in F&B sector
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Wednesday, 22 December, 2021, 13 : 00 PM [IST]
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Pratik Nayi
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Food safety is generally concerned about your daily routines for the preparation of food, handling process, and storage of food resulting in inhibiting foodborne illness and food hazards. Everybody is now health concerned, practices for the safe food handling process is the most important thing and should be followed to maintain your daily healthy life. Many people are dying just because of contaminated water or food so that just proper handling for the preparation of food can prevent most foodborne diseases.
Here are the mentioned five keys that can keep your food safe and helpful for food preparation:
1. Cleaning is a very basic and most important thing for the preparation of food. So, keep the area clean where you generally prepare your food.
2. Nowadays people use raw and cooked foods or vegetable to maintain health.
3. Proper cooking must require.
4. Keeping your food at a safe temperature and proper storage condition scan help to maintain your food as good as fresh.
5. Use safe/clean water and raw materials.
General food precaution
As we know that some mentioned general food precautions we are not going through it properly sometimes, but it must be considered and need to follow. During the Covid-19 situation, everybody used their hand wash and sanitised well but it is not up to only Covid-19 days. We need to follow some general precautions, especially when preparing food.
Particularly post Covid situation there is strictly need to follow some measures as mentioned below:
Wash hands with handwash/soap before preparing food, before eating food, and after using the bathroom.
• Sometimes the water is not available so at that time we can use disposable antiseptic wipes or hand sanitiser.
• Stay away from uncooked food and include more vegetables in your diet at daily basis.
• Proper washing with hot water is required for fruits and vegetables before eating or cooking.
• Do not use unpasteurised dairy products like yogurt, cheese, and milk.
• Use a boiled water/sealed water bottle for drinking.
• For carbonated water and beverages, use the canned bottle for safe to drink.
Advanced technologies in food and beverages
Nowadays, In the food and beverages sector,the demand increasing for technology purposes just because of the digital opportunities, advanced processes and technology, and health-focused consumers.Food and beverages mainly focus on the people's diet because consumers are using a healthy diet and increasing the demand for a functional drink as well so accordingly food and beverages industry also changing.
The technologies like advanced data analytics and the cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), smart sensors, and smart robotics are boosting efficiency, cost-effectiveness and helping the growth of new trends in food and beverages. It also offers some advantages like product quality enhancement, minimising energy consumption, and optimisation of the process.
Usually, the food and beverages industry is experiencing a digital transformation. Advanced technologies can help in many ways such asimproved food and beverages quality, optimisation in the production line, Integrated functions, and management, reduce energy consumption, increased flexibility, improvement in overall equipment efficiency (OEE), the particular software is also helpful for the optimisation of processing operation so that the industry can increase productivity and efficiency.
As per current latest technology trends used in the food and beverage industry mainly focused on Artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of things (IoT), and big data.
Artificial intelligence (AI) deals with the enormous potential for the growth of the Food and beverages industry. By using AI, the food and beverages industry trying to know more about consumers' preferences, which taste they most like to eat, and also trying to develop some new products and recipes and forecast supplies accordingly.
For the cleaning, grading, and sorting of the food items, fruits, and vegetables, AI was very useful at that time and it can also make it an easier process. AI also can forecast the pricing of food items by adopting consumers' demands and preferences. Nowadays the many food and beverages usean Artificial neural network (ANN), for better supply chain management so it can be helpful for monitoring the shipments at every stage during the supply chain.
It can improve food safety and standards. After and before each process the all equipment and machinery in the food production line need to be cleaned well to follow food standards. For this kind of purpose, the University of Nottingham, UK has developed a Self-optimising-Clean-In-place (SOCIP), system which has ultrasonic sensing and optical fluorescence imaging for the scanning of food that remains left inside the equipment or machinery after use.
It can help optimise the cleaning process very well and also save water and cleaning time reduces up to 50% because there is no need to disassemble the equipment.
To reduce contamination and pathogens, most food and beverages industries now use robotics in the food production line. It doesn’t mean that the robots just save time and are more efficient or faster but it's really helpful to make totally sterile. AI also can reduce the laborious work because the labor during the food sorting process consumes more time and slows the production line and also requires the many staff as well so that the AI is very helpful for the food and beverages industry.
Internet of Things (IoT), also helps to boost the performance of the food and beverages industry and uses IoT in the form of sensors. It can monitor goods in warehouses, the temperature in storage, food transportation. Some sensors are used in smart packaging also so it can indicate the shelf life of food via sensors light. Smart packaging is also an interesting phenomenon for the food and beverages industry.
So generally, smart and advanced technologies pushing the food and beverages industry into a new trend of the digital age with artificial intelligence in robotics and smart food factories. Big data is mainly generated from the smartphones,IoT, social media, and multimedia which has produced structured or unstructured format flow of data.Big data is also a very broad and important factor which used to provide predictive visions in several steps in the support supply chain, food supply chain for taking the real-time decision and designing the strategies.
In the near future, the many foods and beverages industries will continue to develop such kindsof technologies for sustainable growth and consumer preference because of that, advanced technologies will help for the single-use plastic. Some retail stores and hospitality have designed machines developed by US-based companies so they can quickly sanitise bottles and refill the recyclable beverages bottles.
(The author belongs to Department of Tropical Agriculture and International Cooperation, National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, Ho-Hsien Chen, Taiwan. He can be reached at pratiknayi97@gmail.com)
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