In the food industry and beverage industry, product quality is paramount. Food and beverage quality control is a crucial consideration for home hobbyists and large manufacturers alike—it can make all the difference between a bubbly, well-balanced wine spritzer and one that’s flat, spoiled, and tastes more like vinegar than a fruity refreshment. One wrong step in the production process can affect the finished product.
That’s why best quality control practices for fermented alcoholic beverages like beer, liquor, and wine are vital to ensure that products are crafted with high-caliber ingredients and securely shipped and stored.
In this guide, we’ll break down crucial elements of food and beverage quality control to ensure breweries, grocery stores, and bars near you are receiving top-quality cans of your spirits and sips.
What is Quality Control (QC)?
Quality control, or QC, falls under the umbrella of a facility’s quality system. While some food and beverage packagers also have a quality assurance (QA) team to brainstorm and create quality standards for their own facilities (that meet existing regulations), QC teams bring those criteria to life in real-time.
You can think of QA and QC as clothing designers and clothing manufacturers, respectively.
In this analogy, clothing designers develop general ideas for garments, assemble a prototype or two, and research trends and effective tailoring methods. After the designer finalizes their design, they send the patterns to clothing manufacturers and tailors to replicate their product with fidelity.
Of course, some designers also fulfill orders for their designs, cutting fabrics and sewing them together themselves without an extra team. Some food and beverage manufacturers marry QA and QC, so the same team planning the quality control methods also puts them into practice.
Overall, QC describes the efforts a facility makes to create and maintain quality standards to produce safe, compliant products.
Quality Control for Beverages
As a beverage crafter, you may be familiar with QC best practices if you’ve dabbled in in-house packing. However, larger facilities, like copackers, must also adopt quality control methods to ensure their client’s products are in top condition every time their cans come off the line.
More specifically, when you work with professionals like Wildpack, you’re guaranteed top-quality service in addition to top-quality control. We ensure your beverages are expertly crafted, securely stored, and safely shipped during our end-to-end packaging and production processes. Additionally, you can communicate with our customer service team at any time to ensure you’re getting your money’s worth.
That being said, there are six key elements in every top-notch quality control procedure.
#1 Monitoring the Supply Chain
The effective, smooth production of goods and services across the globe depends upon appropriate supply chain management. In supply chain management, a team monitors the entire supply chain from start to finish, including:
- Raw material cultivation, inventories, and harvesting
- Raw material processing into useful ingredients or parts
- Transport of processed parts to manufacturing facilities
- Productivity of the production line
- Shipping from the manufacturing facility to distributors or sellers
A successful QC operation takes many pages out of supply chain management’s book to source high-quality ingredients, track potential recalls or warnings about those ingredients, and plan for supply chain inconsistencies.
Beverage-makers and co-packers must also monitor the supply chain that impacts the beverage recipes and shipments to ensure quality control across batches. QC teams make every effort to ensure that their supply chain produces high-quality ingredients.
For example, if you plan to make a batch of orange-flavored canned cocktails, but your local supplier is out of bulk quantities of citric acid, you may search for another supplier nearby that has high-quality ingredients in stock to ensure your cocktails stay consistent across each batch.
Those in the beverage industry will also monitor any recalls of their ingredients. If there is a recall, they’ll then need to contact restaurants and stores that are currently selling the product to inform them of the recall and avoid selling spoiled products.
#2 Inspecting Raw Materials and Ingredients
Even if the QC team doesn’t identify any problems in the supply chain before a shipment of raw materials arrives for manufacturing, they’ll still inspect the order for product inconsistencies or potential hazards before beginning the production process (which is why it pays to learn the ways to store alcohol).
High-quality QC teams have a variety of inspection standards and safeguards in place to adequately assess their ingredients and identify any safety issues as soon as possible—ideally before production starts. Ensuring that their raw materials are safe to use benefits food and beverage manufacturing facilities for multiple reasons:
- Removing low-grade or damaged supplies from the production line prevents manufacturing delays.
- Keeping inconsistent products out of the inventory prevents damage to expensive machinery or injury to workers.
- Eliminating unsafe ingredients moves the facility one step closer to making a safe, delicious product for consumers.
Assessing the quality of materials before production starts is crucial to a high-caliber QC process.
#3 Chemical Testing
As products move through the production line, QC teams perform chemical tests throughout the facility’s manufacturing process to make sure that workers are completing every step according to in-house and regulatory guidelines.
While you may not pull out pipettes and a microscope after completing each step in your cocktail recipe, you’ll perform qualitative analyses of your own—food and beverage QC teams don’t stick their bare hands in batches of cocktails to taste test, but the result is similar.
If your citrus cocktail tastes bad at any point in the process, you’re unlikely to continue with the recipe, and you’re going to try to figure out what went wrong.
Similarly, if QC teams detect chemical abnormalities during an intermediary step, they’ll pause production to assess what went wrong and make adjustments accordingly.
Results of chemical testing can inform potential recalls, production pauses, or recipe changes for food and beverage manufacturers. Thus, chemical testing throughout the manufacturing process helps ensure product quality and consumer safety.
#4 Nutritional Investigating
The Food and Drug Administration requires that most food and beverage manufacturers add a nutrition label to their products, detailing ingredient information, nutrient volume, and calorie counts.
While nutrition labeling gives consumers agency over what they choose to consume, monitoring nutritional data is also integral to the QC process for food and beverage manufacturers.
Today, most manufacturers create detailed nutrition labels based upon the component products the facility used to make a product.
For instance, if they make a massive batch of citrus cocktails, they calculate the volume and nutritional components of each ingredient—the sugar, alcohol, and citrus—to determine the calories, fat, carbohydrates, and nutrients in each individual package.
This process—sometimes called the Atwater system—was established relatively recently and replaced an older method wherein scientists completely incinerated a food product and measured the heat output the product released as it burned to identify nutritional values.
While the Atwater system no longer requires burning up perfectly acceptable food products, QC teams regularly use other chemical methods to confirm the theoretical nutritional values manufacturers post on their packaging. If the QC team discovers that a canned cocktail has three more grams of sugar than expected, they’ll do the following:
- Repeat the process to identify a potential pattern or one-time anomaly
- Recall the anomalous batch or halt its distribution if it’s not yet out the door
- Alter the nutrition label to account for the unforeseen, but consistent, change in values
#5 Ensuring Safe and Effective Packaging
An adequate QC team in a food and beverage facility will also inspect product packaging. They’ll search for:
- Packages with safety concerns, like sharp edges or unstable bottoms
- Damages that will impact product freshness, like scratches or punctures
- Adequate sealing during product opening and re-sealing (if applicable)
If the QC team has done their part throughout the rest of the manufacturing process, they’ll have already deemed the product inside the package safe for consumption. But, they also have to make sure that the product remains safe by putting the packaging through its paces.
Preventing failing packaging is as important in large-scale food and beverage manufacturing as it is in your home kitchen, so QC teams make sure that packing materials are in safe, working, condition before proceeding to the final step in the process—the sensory test.
#6 Inspecting with the Senses
While supply chain monitoring, chemical tests, and nutrition label verification are vital to a successful manufacturing effort, qualitative data goes a long way. Thus, the last step in the QC process typically involves a sensory inspection—in other words, a taste, smell, and sight test.
While production issues are typically identified earlier in the process, final observations for taste, color, and scent consistencies are the last step to ensure a high-quality product.
Wildpack Beverage: Ensuring High Quality Since 2017
Food and beverage quality control is a massive consideration, even for small facilities and in-house packagers. A multi-step process that requires numerous hands-on-deck, QC teams ensure that manufactured food and drinks are safe for public consumption and compliant with regulations.
At Wildpack, quality control drives every decision we make. We know how disappointing a spoiled batch of cocktails can feel. As such, our QC team takes every possible precaution to ensure production runs smoothly to produce top-quality sips in every can.
Since 2017, we’ve been a trusted face in the beverage packaging industry. Trust in us to do canning better. Partner with Wildpack today—we do canning better.
Sources:
American Society for Quality. Quality Assurance and Quality Control. https://asq.org/quality-resources/quality-assurance-vs-control
IBM. What Is Supply Chain Management? https://www.ibm.com/topics/supply-chain-management
Scientific American. How Do Food Manufacturers Calculate the Calorie Counts of Packaged Foods?. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-food-manufacturers/
