Ever noticed how your favourite Walkers crisps almost always expire on a Saturday? That’s because the company’s production week starts on Sunday, so everything made that week shares the same “best before” date. This small detail points to a bigger challenge: the changing number of stock-keeping units (SKUs) in consumer goods is making food and beverage manufacturing more complex. Here, Beth Ragdale, software business manager at automation specialist Beckhoff UK, explains how software-defined motion systems can help manufacturers adapt to SKU demand, improving batch-level control.
In recent years, major food and beverage manufacturers like Unilever, Coca-Cola and Tyson have been cutting back on underperforming product lines to improve margins and reduce overheads.
According to L.E.K. Consulting’s latest packaging study, that trend has only accelerated post-COVID, as brands increase focus on their core products. However, not everyone is playing it safe, with many remaining committed to product innovation, releasing new flavours, changing to more sustainable packaging and introducing different pack sizes to keep up with what consumers want.
So, is product development slowing down or just changing? For manufacturers, the answer still points to more complexity, not less.
Managing production
More product lines mean more changeovers, more downtime and a lot more manual set-up. Traditional conveyor lines were designed for high-volume, low-variation production, churning out identical products for hours or even days at a time.
When you manufacture dozens of lines, each with different packaging, ingredients or sizes, everything changes. Every format shift — say, moving from a share bag to a multi-pack — requires mechanical retooling, which can take operators offline for minutes or even hours.
This constant starting and stopping slows production down, drives up costs and puts huge pressure on production teams who must juggle batch sizes, cleaning protocols and schedules.
Smoother changeovers
That’s why manufacturers need an approach that can handle variety without grinding production to a halt. Rather than relying on manual adjustments and long changeovers, the future is in flexible motion profiles.
Flexible motion profiles improve the changeover between different production lines, running multiple product variants side by side without stopping. Just look at Beckhoff’s XTS system, which offers a new way to move products through a manufacturing line.
Instead of traditional conveyors, it uses magnetically driven shuttles that glide along integrated motor tracks. When used with TwinCAT software running on an industrial PC, each shuttle can be controlled independently with its own motion profile.
This means the system is ready to go right after setup, no fiddly wiring or adjustments needed. Plus, manufacturers can save space and build machines that fit their exact needs because the tracks can be designed in different shapes and layouts.
One example can be seen with a European OEM, Brenton, that retrofitted its pizza case-packer with XTS and managed to support 26 different pizza SKUs on the same line.
The system handles up to 27 cases per minute — that’s about 140 pizzas. It also cut infeed changeover times from thirty minutes to just five. What used to take three separate machines now runs smoothly on a single, flexible XTS-driven line.
The food and beverage industry is moving faster than ever. With AI, predictive analytics and smart factories, manufacturers are starting to plan production around real-time demand. To do that, they need production systems built to handle change, and ones that can deal with complexity.
So, the next time you notice your crisps all expire on a Saturday, think of it less as an expiry date and more as a reminder that the industry is racing to catch up with retail demands, using smarter technology to deliver fresher, more varied products quickly.
For more information on the XTS, visit the Beckhoff UK website or call +44 (0)1491 410 539.
