Manufacturers can often boost efficiency in pet food production without expensive facility upgrades, focusing instead on ingredient handling and batching systems. During a recent industry chat, Todd Baker, vice president of innovation, and Justin McRae, pet food industry manager at Horizon Systems, outlined practical ways to reduce waste and improve plant performance. Their discussion highlighted that the front end of the plant, where raw materials are mixed, frequently drives more recalls than contamination risks and is often overlooked once products ship.
Operators frequently swap ingredients without a formal change process, leading to inefficiencies. It is quite common that systems receive inquiries where people have changed ingredients without going through a good management-of-change process, Baker said, pointing to ingredients such as tapioca starch that can require equipment to be configured differently. Evaluations should reach the people interfacing with the equipment every day because there are a lot of unknown workarounds that operators have found to get around issues with system changes or maintenance. Automating those fixes can produce significant gains.
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Legacy systems were not designed to reclaim ingredients or track reclaimed lots, Baker noted, leaving no path to recover leftover material at the end of a campaign. This is a growing problem as pet food ingredients become more expensive and specialized. Reclaiming material also raises a controls challenge: how do you do lot tracking on something that was already staged into a potential lot? Operations must be able to document that an ingredient was reclaimed and returned to inventory without mixing lots.
Manufacturers should verify the real maintenance state and undocumented modifications of equipment they plan to reuse. Speeds have been changed, air locks or blower airflows have been adjusted over time, so manufacturers should confirm whether the equipment’s performance and maintenance condition actually match what they believe.
Streamlining operations and using technology
Switchover and clean-out time is a hidden throughput bottleneck that equipment performance when it is not feeding or batching matters as much as when it is. Equipment accessibility makes systems simpler to maintain. Smart discharge and point-source dust collection recover costly ingredients, McRae said, citing screw feeders with built-in clean-out ports and easy-clean air locks.
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Legacy minor and micro feeding clusters often route all hoppers to a central dust collector, mixing and losing expensive material. Baker is seeing more demand for individual, point-source dust collection that pulses material back into the same hopper. Every point where an ingredient enters the system should have a reliable way to discharge it without loss.
Looking ahead, McRae predicted that more synthetic and novel ingredients will push manufacturers toward modular designs. The growing use of functional ingredients and rising label-claim scrutiny, fueled by the humanization of pets, makes batching systems even more important to what’s going on in your facility. Baker added that AI, added sensors and more weigh points can turn plant data into preventive insight. AI can serve as a redundant check that ingredients are staged correctly and can alert operators to rising pressure or falling airflow before a problem escalates.
