Tech For All Taps

NOBL Beverages had invested in tanks and other high-speed beverage production equipment when the Covid pandemic hit. To keep the production line running at full capacity, the owner pivoted and completely reinvented his business.

Automation sensors improve beverage production.

By Aaron Ganick, BrewOps

Like many small beverage producers, the global pandemic hit New England-based NOBL Beverages extra hard. The growing company was producing cold brew coffees and teas and had just expanded its 3,800-sq.-ft. facility to 35,000 sq. ft. Then everything shut down.

“Covid just wreaked absolute havoc on our business,” remembers Connor Roelke, Founder and CEO of NOBL Beverages. “Our core customer base was all small independent markets and cafes—basically every single retail customer that got shut down during Covid. We were planning for all this future expansion, and then it all just came totally crashing down.”

Along with the facility expansion, NOBL had invested in tanks and other high-speed beverage production equipment. Without orders to keep the production line running at full capacity, Roelke pivoted and completely reinvented his business. 

“We started opening our doors to contract manufacturing opportunities, leveraging our creativity and process expertise to help others fulfill their packaged beverage orders,” he said. “We used our equipment and space to make products for other brands who did not have a production facility of their own, needed to produce more to fulfill growing orders, or improve the quality of their finished products.” 

During the first year after the pandemic, NOBL was able to produce, fill, and package about 500,000 cans with their own beverages, as well as products for other brands. Today, the company produces more than 500,000 cans each week, 52 weeks/year. Roelke attributes the business turnaround to two critical indicators—the savvy decision to reinvent the business plan and the bold use of automation. 

Sensor technology sends an email, text message, or group chat to operators for developing situations on the production line that may need attention.

Changing the game

All beverage manufacturers rely upon critical utilities such as chillers, boilers, pasteurizers, and compressors to keep their operations up and running. Intelligent sensors can provide crucial real-time quality data like dissolved oxygen, total dissolved solids (concentration), pH, and brix (sugar). Measuring the conductivity of clean in place (CIP) chemicals and rinse water can also significantly reduce waste and increase sustainability. 

With the simplicity of even a single sensor, installed in minutes, manufacturers can automate critical equipment and begin receiving real-time data instantly, providing actionable insights to enhance productivity and quality.

“We decided that we were in a situation where the more we were willing to invest in quality, the more likely we were to have repeat customers in the long run,” Roelke explained. 

That decision was inspired by an expensive lesson learned when their pasteurization tunnel went down without notice. 

NOBL cans 99% of its beverages, so the pasteurizer plays a key role in sanitizing both the beverage and can at the same time. In most facilities, especially those producing non-alcoholic beverages, pasteurization is essential to ensure shelf stability, increase shelf life, and maximize quality and taste. To achieve this, the beverage is heated to a specific temperature for a minimum amount of time as it travels through a steam tunnel, which essentially acts as a long conveyor belt with shower heads. During this journey, the cans are sprayed with heated water to effectively eliminate any bacteria.

“We were in the very early days of having the tunnel,” Roelke said. “We would continuously have issues either with the boiler not keeping up with the load or, in some cases, one of the bays would run out of water. When a bay runs out of water, there is nothing for the pump to circulate, which could mean we would need to repeat the pasteurization at best or, at worst dump the product entirely.”

With tens of thousands of cans traveling down the conveyor belt at a time, a lot is at stake, and there is always an operator who inspects them on the other side of the tunnel. However, this common practice of measuring the pasteurization effectiveness at the end of the process is critically and fundamentally flawed. If something has already gone wrong with the equipment, operators will not know until it’s too late, and they must physically pull the entire batch by hand and re-pasteurize —a process that wastes considerable time, manpower, and money. Not providing the proper pasteurization for the canned beverages is simply not an option.

The company produces more than 500,000 cans each week, 52 weeks/year.

Automating the process

The solution was to use sensor technology to automate the process. NOBL partnered with a technology company to install sensors and automation that alerted operators in real time if there were issues with the tunnel. The technology sends an email, text message, or group chat to operators for developing situations such as when the boiler is not making enough steam pressure, or if the tunnel-bay water levels are too low for effective circulation. 

“This allows us to be proactive rather than being reactive and waiting for something bad to happen,” Roelke said. “We were finally able to get ahead of some of these issues that we were experiencing.” 

Automation is changing the game for beverage production, not only with regard to improving the product quality but by making facilities more efficient, nimbler, and more flexible.  

Before automation, when the steam boiler would go down, an operator would only have a short window of time to manually restart the system before the main production line would have to be stopped and restarted. By adding sensors and automated alerts to the boiler, the problem can be resolved before all the steam leaves the system, preventing the stoppage of production and saving money, downtime, and potentially lost product. 

“Automation to avoid issues may not always prevent those issues from repeating,” Roelke admitted. “But at least it gives you information that you can act upon to address it immediately before too much damage occurs. It allows us to respond to problems faster, which provides a level of comfort.” 

NOBL has 10 bays in the pasteurization tunnel that receive the spray water for it to be recirculated by pumps. A certain level of water must be maintained at all times for the pumps to operate. Before installing automation, finding out which bay inside the long metal pasteurization tunnel had an issue was impossible until it was too late. 

The solution was to install sensors on the drain of each bay to calculate level from the hydrostatic pressure. Warning and alarm thresholds are defined, and operators can view the individual bay levels in real time. The system also alerts operators when the water levels are too low, like the boiler application. With those alerts, operators can act before costly downtime and product waste occurs. 

To increase the useability of the system, operating data is displayed on a large monitor in front of the pasteurizer so operators can see immediately what’s happening in each of the ten bays at any time. Historical views are also available to dive deeper into trends and provide opportunities for continuous improvement. 

“Whether you’re an operator, a maintenance engineer, or someone sitting in the finance department, we can use this data and automation in completely different ways to gain completely different insights from the same set of data gathering sensors,” Roelke reports. “It’s just so intuitive. Anybody can look at this and have all the data they need to make sure operations are running efficiently and address any concerns quickly.”

Realizing the benefits 

NOBL now has about 24 sensors on various production equipment throughout the facility. “We monitor the temperature of our walk-in cooler and now we receive alerts even before the temperature gets out of range,” Roelke said. “This just gives us more ways to be able to keep tabs on the business without having to physically be here all day.” 

With about 50 people working in the expanded NOBL facility, Roelke said the training on how to use the sensor technology and the mobile app that delivers actionable, measurable data and worry-free alerts has been simple and intuitive.

“The cost of equipment mistakes and production shutdowns are not hard to measure,” he concludes. “You feel pain quickly. But we immediately see the return on our investment since installing these sensors. Having this automation gives us peace of mind knowing that we can keep things moving, guarantee our high quality, and avoid some of these mistakes that hinder production.”

Aaron Ganick is a technology entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Preddio Technologies, North Andover, MA, (preddio.com), the parent company of BrewOps. Gannick holds a degree in electrical engineering from Boston Univ. and has authored dozens of granted patents in the fields of optical networking, telecommunications, and automation systems. He can be reached at aaron.ganick@brewops.com. For more information, visit brewops.com.