Food Industry Bar Code Application
NOL-TEC Southeast has developed and installed a high-speed bar-code monitoring
system for a food packaging application. The purpose of the project was to mitigate
liabilities based on recent concerns over food allergies. The system ensures that incorrect
labels are not used during the manufacture and packaging of food products. Labels appear
on wrapper film, trays, and shipping boxes. The system consists of 18 high speed bar-code
scanners located at distributed locations around 4 work cells. The system can monitor over
1700 bar-codes per minute, on a single production line.
This project was conceived in response to the Food and Drug Administration’s 2001 allergens
regulations (Sec. 555.250 Statement of Policy for Labeling and Preventing Cross-contact of Common
Food Allergens) and the Bioterrorism Act of 2002. The FDA allergens regulations require that food
that comes into contact with any of eight common allergens, which together cause approximately 90
percent of allergic reactions in the United States each year, be clearly labeled. The Bioterrorism
Act stipulates what’s been called “one step back, one step forward,” that is, each part of the food
chain must be able to trace its source back one step, and trace the destination of the food one
step forward.
Design: Each of 18 locations has a bar-code scanner, and a control panel with local status and
alarm lights, horn, enable/disable switches, alarm silence button, and an output for stopping
the machinery. The control panels are networked via TCP/IP over Ethernet to a host computer
with supervisory functions including a GUI, setup, SQL database and data logging functions.
Operation: A supervisor chooses the product that is to be run on each Cell in the production line.
Proper film wrappers, trays and shipping boxes are set up on the machinery. The host computer then sends
a query to a SQL Server database. The database returns a dataset including a list of which bar codes should
be expected at each of the 18 locations. These will be different for various locations, and will depend on
whether the label is for an individual pack, tray, or box. The host computer then sends the “expected”
bar-code label data to the controllers at each location.
Once production begins, the local controllers report exceptions only, back to the host. This avoids
overwhelming the host with a large volume of data. The host monitors the status of all controllers and
creates an activity log. The log includes all configuration changes, mis-reads and wrong labels. Data
is logged back to the SQL Server database where reports are available on demand.
Configuration: The system is configurable in its response to all exceptions. The supervisor can instruct
the system to alarm after a specific number of bad reads, or wrong labels. The machine will alarm and/or
shutdown the equipment based on the configured parameters entered by the supervisor.
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