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Natural Foods Revival Meets Manufacturing Efficiencies

Chobani, a leader in Greek yogurt, hits its stride with a software-based SCADA system that allows for greater plant visibility and production output.

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Retail consumers have demanded a new paradigm from food producers and, in return, the market has responded with a natural ingredients or organic revival. Food companies have met this tectonic shift by building flexible control platforms and enterprise systems to produce better vertical supply efficiencies.

Norwich, N.Y.-based Chobani is a global food company that has met the back-to-basics revival with its headline product, authentically strained Greek yogurt. The food maker is now leaning on its global production facilities to move quickly with related products, such as natural grains and dessert ingredients.

Chobani recently invested $450 million to build a production facility in Twin Falls, Idaho, using Inductive Automation’s Ignition SCADA platform, Rockwell Automation’s programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and human-machine interface (HMI) software, and Schneider Electric’s Wonderware historians.

The SCADA platform oversees the entire production platform in Twin Falls, and at plants in New York and Australia. These relatively new plants lean on the SCADA platform to provide more production visibility to operators and executives. The SCADA system, for example, monitors and provides key performance indicators (KPIs) for the processing and packaging operations for all three plants.

With such large factory footprints, better visibility of production data was a key requirement, including mobility. “With our large-screen dashboards on the plant floor, operators can monitor clean in place (CIP), separation percentages and view instant notifications for the process,” says Hugh Roddy, vice president of global engineering and project management for Chobani.

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