Cost Effective Food Quality Monitoring using PLC : An Optimized Approach

There are a lot of concerns in food manufacturing industries like global demand on resources, increasing number of competitors, economic uncertainty and many more. Many of the challenges faced by food manufacturers relate to meeting changing demands of consumers. Consumers need healthier food without compromise in taste. The manufacturers also need to ensure that taste, texture, shelf-life, appearance, cost and nutritional content are all maintained at a particular standard. They also need to ensure that there are very minimal differences in appearance from the original products, as any changes could result in their product failing to satisfy consumers and them opting for an alternative. This can involve significant amounts of experimentation before a suitable product is ready for market. In the race of managing all these factors in food products sometimes the quality of the food is compromised or in the race of increasing the production, while sorting stale and fresh foods some mismanagement may happen. This paper basically focuses on solving this problem. It aims at maintaining the quality of food without compromising on its texture, ensuring increased production and also striving to reduce cost of manufacturing the food packets. It measures the quality of food on the basis of two parameters i.e weight and moisture and keeps a track on the defective packets by noting their barcode number which is scanned by the barcode scanner.