Have you ever wondered how the food and beverage manufacturing companies keep their facilities clean? After all, food is one of people’s basic needs, and knowing where our food comes from makes us feel content with our choice.

When it comes to cleaning and sanitizing their liquid tankers and process vessels, the food and beverage processors face many challenges on a daily basis. Thus, they use a variety of tools to make sure they produce quality products, these include process vessel cameras.

One of the most useful tools in their arsenals is a process vessel camera designed to mount on a sight glass window. High-intensity discharge lamps are typically used to illuminate the interior of a process vessel such as a whirlpool or fermentation tank through separate sight windows. A vessel camera can allow manufacturers to identify where sediments remain even after a rinse cycle with water from internal nozzles. Cameras can even help manufacturers save money by helping them to troubleshoot cleaning problems by spotting clogged or defective cleaning nozzles and identifying areas of the process vessel that required additional cleaning attention.

One brewery was able to reduce their water usage significantly by identifying the sediment patterns that different beer recipes produced and adjusting their process vessel rinse cycles accordingly. By allowing them to monitor the entire process from beginning to end, the camera gave them the ability to determine which batches would produce the most sediment and where it would settle. A process vessel that was not thoroughly cleaned before the next batch was processed could have cost the manufacturer thousands of dollars in contaminated products that would have had to be discarded. To learn more about how a major U.S. brewer was able to pay for the cost of their lighting and camera system quickly by preventing product losses, we encourage you to take a few minutes to read our application note on this topic.