Safe Food Manufacturing: Getting Ahead with Automation and Controls
- Jordan Engineering
- 5 hours ago
- 5 min read
“Almost always, allergen recalls are preventable and when they happen, they are essentially failures of process."
– Food Engineering Magazine
The July 2026 article published in the Food Engineering magazine titled, ‘Cross-Functional Food Safety: Breaking Silos to Drive Safe Food Manufacturing’, offers practical insight into the blocks that tend to put food manufacturers at risk of contamination.
We would like to offer our perspective on a crucial (and often overlooked) piece of this conversation: the role of the controls engineer.
Failures of Process
Contamination in food manufacturing is rarely the result of a single point of failure. Instead, it often stems from preventable process inefficiencies:
Cross-contamination.
Environmental cross-contact.
Lack of visibility into cleaning procedures.
Even slight variations in temperature, humidity, timing, or parameter control may cross the safety threshold. This is not a food safety problem, but an operational efficiency problem with food safety implications.
The Role of Control Engineers in Food Safety Discussions
Long before a product ever reaches the shelves, controls engineers are (ideally) already at work, building the process precision that prevents allergen and bacterial contamination. Controls engineers have a very keen sense of what production floor data is being collected, stored and displayed (based on their expertise with PLC, DCS, SCADA and Historian systems). They are often the primary programmers responsible for turning plant data into process interlocks and alarms that help identify, mitigate, and communicate food safety risks, including unsafe process excursions and abnormal operations.
To optimize their effectiveness, Controls Engineers and System Integrators must understand the processes being monitored and controlled; not just the visible "end results", but also the details of how control elements interact with process equipment and materials. This development period secures the equipment against various process conditions, with operating instructions and controls covering abnormal and unexpected situations alongside typical running conditions.
This is a key to success in any large-scale automation project and avoids costly product loss.
At this stage, the questions are:
How can we catch deviations the moment they happen?
Where can safety controls be built into the systems?
How do we make sure the systems support our team and the way they work?
What happens if something fails or falls outside of the safety threshold?
Controls engineers answer:
Here's what data we can collect, and here's how we'll monitor it.
Here's where we need interlocks to prevent unsafe excursions.
Here's how we design around the people who'll use this system, so it fits how they work.
Here's how the system flags it the moment it occurs, what gets logged so we know exactly what happened, and how to reach us for 24/7 on-call support.
Often, controls engineers are handed a completed design to implement without having contributed to the decisions that shaped it. Early involvement means bringing controls engineers into discussions as early as risk assessment and process design. By bringing the right people into the conversation early, manufacturer ensure that their systems are designed to support operators and maximize visibility into the process parameters that matter for food safety.
While early involvement may initially introduce some complexity, it streamlines the later stages by reducing the likelihood of:
Design changes, rework, and expensive retrofits.
Implementation delays.
Product loss.
Operational disruption.
Process inefficiencies which tend to contribute to contamination, often reducing long-run total costs and delivering more consistent outputs.
Including the controls team early in assessments and planning also strengthens the exchange of knowledge and context, reducing misunderstandings and miscommunication that could otherwise lead to process failures.
Roadblock to Food Safety: Operator Buy-in
“When it comes to across-the-board food safety acceptance and advancement, it starts at the top. Manufacturing leadership must understand the "why" behind food safety measures and invest in their implementation, not only to avoid costly recalls but to earn buy-in from all employees.”
– Food Engineering Magazine
Broadly speaking, food safety, like all successful safety-related strategies, is grounded in a cross-functional approach. It is the nature of this approach that there be broad inclusion and participation of interdependent elements of a product facility, including the controls team.
The mistake many facilities make is treating buy-in as an implementation problem, when it is often a design problem rooted in incomplete problem analysis. Too often, the challenges identified by supervisors and managers are incongruent with the issues plant operators are experiencing on the floor. This mismatch tends to lead to resistance and slower adoption of new systems, workarounds, and, in many cases, defection to the old system.
Operators understand what they need from an interface to do their jobs effectively and safely. Involving them in design and ensuring they understand the context of the changes needed, supports adoption and correct use of the system (which is a food safety issue, not just a usability issue).
“A process that best supports operator buy-in is one which was designed with input from front-line workers (e.g. process operators), and where they were involved early in the design process.”
– Jordan Engineering P. Eng
Cross-Functional Teams, Supported by Automation
The Jordan Engineering team works with operators directly during design to make sure the interface matches how they work.
That kind of involvement doesn't stay contained to one team. Cross-functional teams support efficiency and operations. Automation supports cross-functional teams, and mitigates risks that occur on the plant floor, helping inform proactive decision making at the supervisory and business levels.
When automation systems are properly designed, they provide a shared platform for visibility. Food safety teams can see real-time process parameters and excursions, while operations can see efficiency metrics and bottlenecks, and compliance can see the audit trail. Everyone has access to the best possible information and visibility necessary to perform their roles, so teams can move with confidence and benefit from fewer surprises.
Without this visibility, each team operates with incomplete information and are, in a sense, partially blind.
Automation systems provide the procedural aspects of a food safety strategy with a concrete platform to analyze, contextualize, aggregate, document, and report how each part of the process meets food safety parameters, improving accountability and transparency and catching errors earlier. The automation team assists with ongoing process improvements to optimize reliability over time, and there is a more solid basis to improve system safety overall.
The Result
The control systems collect and analyze data from sensors and machines, adjustments are made automatically or operators are alerted, providing:
Traceability: Recording every step of production for audits and recalls.
Quality control: Detecting deviations in temperature, pressure, or other parameters.
Predictive maintenance: Identifying equipment issues before failures occur.
Regulatory compliance: Generating reports that meet food safety standards.
Operators adopt the new processes and feel empowered to participate in food safety strategy because they have been given visibility into the process and a defined channel to flag unsafe conditions before they escalate.
Product reaches market with minimal delays caused by recalls or emergency fixes.
Food safety parameters are maintained consistently, and manufacturing teams can take pride in their product and the processes that protect the food on our tables.
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