Why Food and Beverage Plants Keep Falling Behind on Data
Can more efficient plants be the key to regaining margins for food and beverage (F&B) manufacturers? In the past two years, the industry has seen its profitability decline because of several adverse trends.
The first is supply chain disruptions because of geopolitical factors such as the war in Ukraine, a country nicknamed the “breadbasket” of Europe for its status as a major grain exporter, or droughts in key producing regions in and outside of Europe.
A side effect of these disruptions has been volatile prices for natural gas and crude oil, with a direct impact on the F&B sector. Energy is a major input for everything from running manufacturing plants and refrigeration to transportation and the cost of agricultural raw materials. Energy can commonly represent 15% of the operational costs of an F&B facility.
Meanwhile, European manufacturers face a growing compliance tax in the form of increasingly detailed traceability requirements under food safety regulations, as well as new rules on food waste or sustainable packaging .
Compounding these challenges, the sector has long struggled with staffing issues, from an ageing workforce to skill shortages, for roles that range from food safety and automation specialists to factory operatives or forklift drivers.
The Data Problem Behind the Operational Gaps
To address these challenges, digital transformation is often presented as a do-it-all solution that can raise labor productivity, simplify compliance, improve production reliability and boost the sector’s razor-thin margins.
However, a recent Hexagon survey of 400 senior industrial executives highlights how these promises have yet to fully materialize. For one, 62% of F&B executives agree that “Digital transformation efforts in our organization haven't yet returned the expected value”.
Part of the reason may be the technological complexity of the F&B plant. Quoted in the report, the head of IT and data at a major F&B group captures the issue:
“The landscape in manufacturing is very segmented for many reasons – partly, for example, because of acquisitions of factories. Legacy systems can have different processes and different data models. From a global view, this means there are gaps in the reconciliation of data for dashboarding to make decisions. We can bridge that gap, there are many ways to do it but it is not always a consistent process.”
More Data Sources, More Problems
The result of these gaps is constant challenges in having a direct line-of-sight into the operations of a plant. For example, 74% of surveyed F&B executives say their operations suffer because of out-of-date information and 76% report impacts from inaccurate data. 72% cite poor data connectivity across systems as a factor.
Equally concerning, 77% say the number of tools and data sources grew in the past twelve months without better interoperability. In other words, the plot only thickens.
The effects are felt every day. Manual processes slow down decision-making, increase the risk of error and leave frontline teams under-informed. When these gaps surface during audits or in the middle of a production crisis, the costs can be significant. According to research, a single hour of unplanned downtime costs a F&B facility an average of $125,000 —and there are 500 of these hours every year.
What Better Looks Like: A Three-Step Model
The reality is that most plants are not starting from zero. They already have complex systems in place, including their ERP, MES, SCADA and various point solutions and legacy systems.
Any transformation approach must be a step-by-step one that realizes value from previous investment and is anchored in interoperability and the ability to scale across plants. Here’s what that can look like:
Step 1: Digitizing Critical Operational Processes
Almost two in three F&B executives (63%) say their organizations still rely on paper-based information in daily operations.
Processes that remain paper-based today have often resisted previous digitalization efforts. This makes it all the more important to prioritize those with a clear negative impact on safety, efficiency or compliance—such as logs, checklists, inspection records, work orders, equipment isolation tasks, or manual instrument readings.
In all these areas, digitalization not only improves efficiency but also provides valuable insight into plant and asset health.
Still, past experience shows that new solutions must be complete, easy-to-use and make a clear difference in the field. That’s the case with Hexagon’s j5 Operations Management Solutions, which replace manual processes with structured digital workflows for shift handovers, event logs, instructions and mobile rounds.
Digitalization allows teams to access updates in real time, from any location, instead of relying on in-person communication or repeated trips to the control room. Managers can monitor plant status remotely. Audit trails are automatically generated, which reduces the burden of compliance and audits.
Step 2: Paying Particular Attention to Procedure Management
Another area of attention should be procedure management.
The 2024 Global Food Safety Training Survey found that nearly three-quarters of F&B respondents agreed with the statement: “Despite our training efforts, we still have employees not following established protocols on the floor.” - “a number that has remained unchanged over the last 10 years,” the survey notes.
Employee training is, of course, a component in adherence to procedures, but it cannot be the only one. The survey found that the use of paper and spreadsheets was still prevalent. Barely one in two companies used data to measure whether the procedures that had been taught were applied. One in three companies trained employees without examples from their own facilities.
This is a domain where a modern solution, such as AcceleratorKMS, which unifies training and procedure use in the field, can make a tremendous difference. It creates a direct feedback loop to ensure that procedures are effectively applied, commented and can be reviewed in a timely manner by subject-matter experts if the guidance is inaccurate or out-of-date.
Step 3: Building a Digital Backbone with Interoperability and Scalability in Mind
Digitizing critical field processes and procedures is the first step toward creating a robust Digital Backbone for a plant. This backbone, whether it's a digital twin solution such as HxGN SDx or an Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) application, is the key to eliminating information management headaches and ensuring compliance.
However, any such solution must be designed with two crucial principles in mind: interoperability and scalability. To avoid being locked into a closed ecosystem, the chosen platform must have appropriate third-party connectors and APIs that allow it to integrate seamlessly with existing systems.
Equally important is the ability to offer a replicable formula for digitizing across multiple plants.
A prime example of this approach in action is the case of Nortera , a leader in the North American F&B sector. By implementing a digital solution to standardize and manage maintenance and asset management procedures across its facilities, Nortera was able to increase its equipment's mean time between failures by 20% in its first year.
By digitizing their processes and connecting them to a central system, they were able to gain real-time visibility and a single source of truth for all operational data, which not only improved efficiency but also ensured consistency and compliance across their plants. Last but not least, such consolidation made it possible to deploy AI capabilities for spend management and supply chain optimization, which would have been a significant challenge with traditional, siloed tools.
This example reminds us that digitalization is a way to prepare for the future and move beyond reactive firefighting. A single, connected source of truth provides a strong basis for performance and safety improvements. In today's compliance-heavy, thin-margin environment, this approach can restore an F&B manufacturer's competitive edge.