Flexible recipe management is increasingly important in batch food processing applications, as the market evolves to favor smaller batch sizes and requires increased operator productivity. Integrating the packaging line with processing operations is also becoming more important as manufacturers seek to streamline operations.

“The packaging line in food processing operations consists of various machines from different manufacturers that don’t talk to each other—or anything else,” says Michael Gurney, co-owner of Concept Systems, a systems integrator hired recently to implement a recipe management system and integrate the packaging line at Trailblazer Foods.

The history of the Gresham, Ore., manufacturer of jams, jellies and preserves is a story in itself.

Forebears of company founder Gary Walls settled in the Willamette Valley of Oregon in the 1850s and began farming and developing recipes still used at Trailblazer. Walls grew up farming, picking berries as a child and still working his fourteen-acre field of blueberries. Kidney failure drove him from his original career as a teacher and coach, but a timely transplant with his sister as a donor gave him a new outlook on life. Walls and his wife incorporated Trailblazer Foods in 1985.

Growing company

By the early nineties, Trailblazer Foods had more than doubled its workforce and its product lines. In 1993, a licensing agreement with the restaurant and franchise chain McCormick & Schmicks greatly expanded the company’s product mix. In addition to jams and jellies, the firm took on McCormick & Schmick’s Jake’s Famous Products line, including clam chowder, smoked salmon, specialty sauces and a chocolate truffle cake.

With such expansion, a 40,000 square foot facility was built in Gresham to house not only manufacturing but also the corporate and distribution functions of Trailblazer Foods.

Expansion breeds thoughts of process improvements. Maintaining recipes on legal pads or their equivalent just doesn’t make it in today’s fast-paced manufacturing environment. A recipe in batch manufacturing is not simply a list of ingredients. It also contains the “step” information or instructions for each step of the process, from mixing to heating to finished product.

Traditional automated recipe management systems have primarily been data base managers that download tables of values to a programmable controller (PLC), which sequences these to manage the process. Typically, the steps aren’t easily configurable by the operator. For example, canned recipe management systems usually don’t allow pauses for user intervention and don’t allow tweaking of the recipe while the process is being run. Canned packages also typically don’t support transfer of product between processing stations, and there’s no facility for verifying the machine configuration when new recipes are first run.

Engineers at Trailblazer Foods were looking for a more flexible solution for recipe management than off-the-shelf automation solutions could provide. Trailblazer hired Concept Systems to develop an upgrade to its plant “cook deck” control system. Concept’s challenge was to preserve the recipes and results of the existing manufacturing process while maintaining or increasing product quality, increasing productivity, and reducing costs and waste.

Recipe solutions

Trailblazer’s cook decks contain multiple kettles, each about five feet wide by four feet tall, where the ingredients of their preserves are mixed and cooked. Different kettles are used to hold ingredients at different stages of processing. While one kettle cooks one recipe, a different recipe could be run in the mixing kettle.

Trailblazer Foods’ previous recipe management system relied on the use of paper recipe sheets that specified how much of each ingredient the operator should weigh out and put in the kettle. In addition to replacing the paper recipes with an electronic system, Concept’s approach toward automating this process was to make the underlying design as generic as possible, allowing the operator to define each step.

In the new system, the operator can select and modify cooking recipes via a graphical operator interface screen. Then, the recipe management system measures out ingredients, tracking the weight of each using load cells (electronic weigh scales) mounted under the mixing kettles. The outputs of the system’s three load cells go back to a scale indicator that is readable via the PLC. The PLC can run multiple recipes at the same time, plus control kettle cleanout via water flush and mixing. With the new operator interface, recipe changeover times have been significantly decreased, and one cook can operate and monitor the entire process.

As an integrator, Control Systems uses the control platform specified by its customer. In this case, the customer used PLCs from Rockwell Automation. The control platform, in addition to the custom code, included an ...