8s Summary:Pet food automation | Wijay conveying systems | Safety compliance | Quality consistency

Pet Food Revolution: Wijay's Automated Raw Material Handling for Consistent Quality

The Growing Challenge of Modern Pet Food Production

The global wet pet food market has experienced remarkable growth, reaching $25.5 billion in 2023 and projected to surge to $31.7 billion by 2028. This expansion reflects shifting consumer preferences, particularly in metropolitan areas driven by urbanization and modern lifestyles. Unlike dry pet food's dehydration process, wet pet food maintains its natural moisture content, providing palatability similar to fresh-cooked meals. However, this high moisture content creates unique manufacturing challenges, especially regarding ingredient integrity and preventing microbial growth.

Hygienic pet food facilities must address these challenges while maintaining strict safety standards. The complexity increases when dealing with raw pet food manufacturing, where preserving natural ingredient states becomes paramount. Modern facilities require sophisticated material handling systems that could maintain product quality throughout the entire production chain.

Regulatory Framework and Safety Standards

Pet food safety serves as the cornerstone of manufacturing processes, with the FDA and AAFCO establishing stringent regulations and safety standards that pet food manufacturers must follow to ensure animal health and consumer welfare. The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) mandates that animal foods, including pet foods, must follow the same standards as human food, requiring manufacturers to implement Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs) and develop written food safety plans including hazard analysis and risk-based preventive controls.

Ingredient suppliers pet food companies must undergo rigorous vetting processes to verify quality, safety, and sustainability. These suppliers face increasing scrutiny as manufacturers seek to ensure their raw materials meet the highest standards. The relationship between manufacturers and suppliers has evolved into strategic partnerships where transparency and traceability become essential components of the supply chain.

Advanced Material Handling Solutions for Raw Pet Food Processing

Raw pet food manufacturing involves a multi-step process emphasizing the maintenance of ingredients' natural states. The process begins with ingredient preparation, where fruits and vegetables undergo slicing and dicing for easier grinding, with seeds removed from apples and pumpkins due to their indigestible nature and lack of additional nutrition. Meat products including chicken, organs, bones, and fish such as sardines, anchovies, and mackerel require cutting to provide essential fatty acids.

The grinding and mixing phase involves workers feeding prepared meat, fish, and vegetables into grinders in small batches, ensuring uniform distribution and grinding to consistent particle sizes, forming thick emulsions. These ground raw materials transfer to mixers where rotating paddles further blend ingredients for approximately five minutes until all components combine into uniform raw material masses.

Dense phase conveying systems play a crucial role in this process, particularly when transferring materials between processing stages. These systems offer several advantages over traditional conveying methods:

• Precise Ingredient Dosing Systems: Automated dosing systems handle bulk, medium, small, micro, and even gram-level quantities, plus liquid micro-materials. These systems could automatically obtain formula information through MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems), verify material weights meet standards, and print labels within allowable error ranges, ensuring traceability management.

• Material Conveying Components: Internal material transport, such as conveying ground materials from grinders to mixers or from mixers to packaging areas, relies on pneumatic conveying systems and related components including rotary valves and diverter valves.

• Rotary Valves: These components control pressure and flow of powdered and granular materials, ensuring stable flow during transport while maintaining excellent airtightness to prevent air pollution or external air entry, preserving material purity and safety. Their precise metering and anti-clogging design, such as eagle-beak inlets, ensure system continuity and stability.

• Diverter Valves: These enable rapid switching and precise distribution of material flow directions, featuring low resistance, extended lifespan through ceramic/tungsten carbide coatings, intelligent control, and easy maintenance characteristics suitable for powders, granules, and fibers.

Operational Excellence Through Automation

The implementation of automated material handling systems in hygienic pet food facilities delivers significant operational benefits that could transform production efficiency. Robotic technology and automation optimize various production line processes, saving labor, materials, and operational efficiency. Implementation of robotic systems may also reduce production cycles, decrease energy consumption, and provide safer working environments for employees.

Production process simulation software optimization could significantly reduce waste, with companies like Perfection Pet Foods achieving 90% waste reduction while improving productivity and eliminating production bottlenecks. Industrial automation, particularly batch control systems, plays a crucial role in ensuring consistency in texture and appearance between batches.

Quality consistency emerges as a critical advantage of automated systems. These systems could integrate formula changes and comprehensive formula management, enabling manufacturers to seamlessly adjust parameters and maintain consistency throughout production cycles. Precise particle size control, achieved through automatic hammer mill speed adjustment and online particle size measurement, contributes to uniform mixing and pre-conditioning, thereby improving product quality.

Food Safety and Compliance Enhancement

Pet food safety benefits significantly from automated machine vision inspection systems that could optimize packaging efficiency and integrity while reducing waste and contamination risks. These systems provide comprehensive approaches to ensuring compliance through optical character recognition (OCR), label detection, and traceability functions.

Digital checklists, IoT sensors, and asset management tools enable real-time monitoring of critical factors including temperature, humidity, and air quality. QR code allocation simplifies equipment tracking, maintenance scheduling, and inventory management, further enhancing safety and compliance measures.

The transparency and traceability demanded by consumers find fulfillment through automated systems utilizing barcode scanners to achieve complete traceability from raw materials to shipping. This capability addresses the growing consumer demand for transparency in pet food production.

Wijay's Comprehensive Solution Portfolio

Wijay's pneumatic conveying systems and powder conveying systems address the specific challenges faced by modern pet food manufacturers. The company's automatic batching systems integrate seamlessly with existing production lines, providing the precision and reliability required for hygienic pet food facilities.

The liquid conveying systems offered by Wijay prove particularly valuable for wet pet food production, where maintaining ingredient integrity during transport becomes critical. These systems could handle the unique challenges posed by high-moisture content materials while ensuring contamination prevention throughout the process.

Wijay's solutions support the implementation of smart mill initiatives, progressing from basic automation control (Level 1) through data transparency (Level 2) to self-adjusted systems (Level 3), ultimately working toward fully autonomous operations (Level 4). This progression aligns with industry trends toward intelligent manufacturing systems that could eliminate human error, improve efficiency, and optimize safety.

Future Implications and Industry Evolution

The integration of advanced material handling automation represents an indispensable component of modern pet food manufacturing, particularly for raw and wet pet food production. These systems not only help overcome challenges presented by high moisture content but also drive industry development through improved efficiency, cost optimization, product quality assurance, and strict adherence to safety regulations.

Collaboration with experienced experts utilizing advanced automation solutions may prove key to pet food manufacturers' success in the continuously growing market. The evolution toward fully automated, intelligent manufacturing systems could reshape the industry landscape, providing competitive advantages through enhanced quality control, reduced operational costs, and improved regulatory compliance.

The future of pet food manufacturing lies in the seamless integration of automated material handling systems that could maintain product integrity while meeting the increasingly stringent demands of both regulators and consumers. As the industry continues to evolve, manufacturers who embrace these technological advances may find themselves better positioned to capture market opportunities and deliver superior products to pet owners worldwide.

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