June 20, 2025

Overview
A Food & Beverage manufacturer in Ontario was receiving customer complaints related to product placement non-conformances that were visible though their transparent tray. These issues were a result of inconsistency with their packaging operations. To remedy these issues, the manufacturer had to increase their labor efforts to manually inspect the non-conformances within the packages, resulting in decreased productivity and profitability. Those concerns resulted in the manufacturer engaging with Grantek to develop an automated package inspection solution using a machine vision system.

Challenges
Upon engagement, the manufacturer met with Grantek for a road-mapping session. A key deliverable from that session was the development of a feasibility study using a camera capable of deep learning-based image analysis. Ultimately, that solution was deemed to be too risky due to the large and expanding list of SKUs, SKU features differing over time, the length of run for some product SKUs and the amount of overhead required to upkeep the system using this technology.

Grantek and the manufacturer then decided to pivot to another Cognex vision inspection solution that would be capable of identifying the highest prioritized defects of missing or misplaced products. This led to the development of a pilot program to be deployed on a single segment of the production line. Due to the transparent nature of the product packaging, Grantek was required to specify a specialized photo eye to ensure trigger detection accuracy and repeatability. Grantek’s years of experience delivering Smart Packaging solutions also helped Grantek fine tune the pilot program.

Solutions
With the success of the pilot program realized, Grantek expanded the solution to the other segment of the production line. After the deployment was completed, and the solution was running, reporting functions were added to allow for the manufacturer to focus on non-conformances. These included rejects per shift with missing or misplaced reasoning with images of rejects stored for quality team review. This reporting helped not only operators and plant floor managers, but also senior leaders at the company who were now in a better position to use reports and data to inform strategic business decisions. With the new solution in place, the manufacturer no longer required additional manual labor to monitor outgoing products. The manufacturer was very impressed with the solution Grantek delivered. So much so, that the client is now considering adding similar solutions on other production lines and at some of their other production facilities in North America.