Picture this, you’re checking food quality control parameters on the factory floor. In your hand is a wireless device the size of a Zippo. You press a button and a small beam of light scans the material in front of you. Within a matter of seconds detailed nutritional information appears on your smartphone. You move to the next QA station and do the same – point, scan, get instant results. There’s no time-consuming sampling, no bagging, no costly lab analysis – everything is simple, clean and hassle free.
Seems far-fetched and futuristic? Well, the year is 2017, and this isn’t the food factory of the future, this is happening right here and right now with one of the most exciting phenomena to hit the food industry in decades. The device in question is our revolutionary SCiO micro spectrometer, and there are already companies around the United States and Europe using SCiO to efficiently manage their food quality control processes.
Advanced machine intelligence helps bakery, beverage, poultry and produce companies meet industry demands and keep a check on outcomes and operating costs. But the majority of these advances are focused on mechanization, robotics and process, rather than the field of quality analysis. Tried and tested traditional quality control methods such as wet chemistry, lab analysis and microbiology continue to dominate the field, and will always have a place, but things are changing. The next generation of smart sensors and micro-spectrometers are bringing a whole new dimension in quality capabilities, with SCiO leading the field.
Years of R&D has resulted in SCiO’s unique ultra-compact design, producing a lab-grade micro-spectrometer that is the fraction of the size, and a fraction of the cost of a traditional benchtop spectrometers. One of the most impressive things SCiO users talk about is the fact that it is so small that it fits comfortably in the palm of the hand, while still delivering the punch of an alternative traditional spectrometer tens of times the size. This ultra-portability, and completely wireless technology essentially changes the way manufacturers look at their quality control processes. Now anyone in the receiving dock, on the factory floor, warehouse, or loading bay can benefit from real-time information about materials in a matter of seconds.
Thanks to the synthesis of advanced lab-grade near infrared sensing, powerful cloud computing, and extreme simplicity of use, manufacturers no longer have to rely on expensive, destructive and time consuming manual sampling, or treat sampling points as one homogeneous unit either. Anyone with minimal training can use SCiO to test materials at any point in production, from the BRIX of incoming raw materials, through to the nutritional content of the finished product. There’s no longer a need to limit sampling points to standardized stations, in fact, the beauty of SCiO is that you can effectively and efficiently increase points, resulting in faster detection of errors or quality issues, reducing down-time, recall and delay.
Ensuring food products are safe, nutritious and good quality all the way from farm to fork has entered a new dimension. Welcome to the future of food quality analysis, today!