Within its walls is one of the most technically advanced food processing plants in the country—a greenfield project built from the ground up with automation, labor savings, sustainability and smart design throughout.

For our coverage of Fabulous Food Plants this year, we decided to do something a little bit different in honor of “plants,” aka flora. When we think of food plants, we almost immediately think of processing facilities, but there’s so much more to food production than the processing plant. So, seeing how plant-based foods are altering the ways consumers think about protein, we decided to alter the way we think about food plants.

The Bowling Green, Kentucky facility was built to handle an expansion of the company’s bacon production capabilities.

Stratas Foods says the addition of AAK Foodservice Hillside aligns with its long-term growth objectives, particularly within the value-added oils, dressings, sauces and mayonnaise categories.

Unlike wet ingredients, the handling of dry powder ingredients and products usually requires specifically designed process areas to prevent dangerous situations that could result in worker injuries or death.

Located in Conway, Arkansas, the 570,000-sq.-ft. facility represents a $315 million investment in manufacturing capability and includes a comprehensive beverage development laboratory.

The company’s facility in Seymore, Ind. will build upon key learnings and successes from Vital Farms’ egg washing and packing facility in Springfield, Mo., which opened in 2017.

The Modesto expansion is the second largest capital project in the company’s history.

The new facility will boost the company’s presence in growing edible oil and animal feed markets, and will create opportunities in renewable energy feedstock markets.

The company offers a wide variety of services, including whole bird cut-up, custom breast and thigh deboning, breast and tender hand portioning, marination and re-packing.

Integrated design-build firm A M King has begun a large-scale renovation of a Savannah, Ga.-area facility for MANA Nutrition Inc. that will produce the non-profit’s ready-to-use therapeutic food and ready-to-use supplemental food.

Production from the Nashville facility will support Smithfield's existing portfolio of dry sausage brands including Margherita, Carando and Armour.

The expanded facility includes the addition of a new single-serve aseptic juice production line and a 104,000-sq.-ft. distribution center.

The new facility will be one of the largest manufacturing sites for the Chomps brand and is expected to create approximately 250 full-time jobs, with potential for future expansion.

The facility will serve as the hub for Flora Food Group’s creams and cream cheeses products for the U.S., Canada and across the rest of the Americas region over time.

Idaho Milk Products will break ground on the 183,000-sq.-ft. plant on Oct. 11. The facility will be substantially complete by early 2026 with full commercial production by May 2026.

Since its introduction in late 2019, Kinder Bueno has reached No. 17 in sales among mainstream chocolate brands, hitting more than $214 million in retail sales in the past year.

Located in Southern Idaho's "Magic Valley," the 100,000-sq.-ft. plant produces and packages frozen, fully baked Idaho potatoes known as OH!Tatoes.

Shamrock Farms is investing $59 million into the project, which includes adding additional equipment, cold storage space and a new production filling line.

The production line is now fully operational, with the first ready-to-heat rice pouches rolling off the line and out to the retail market.

This facility is expected to begin production in 2026 and, at peak capacity, will produce 2.7 million bottles per day across six production lines.

The 900,000-sq.-ft. manufacturing facility will increase the company's current production capacity for its Uncrustables brand to help meet demand for the frozen sandwiches.

With the completion of Lamb Weston's second facility for frozen potato products in Kruiningen, The Netherlands, this site has expanded its production capabilities while integrating sustainable technologies to advance potato processing and product packaging.

Nayyer Carpets has a production capacity of 50 million square meters annually and is poised to serve markets across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, Africa, India, and Pakistan. The company’s expansion strategy includes plans to double both its production output and workforce every year as it scales its operations.

Ukraine dreamed of becoming "the key to the security of Europe's gas supply,” the gas hub of Europe. Moscow found this unnecessary. Ukraine wants to become EU's gas hub According to Deputy Minister of Energy of Ukraine Svetlana Grinchuk, imports usually account for up to 10 billion cubic meters of the total volume of Ukrainian storage facilities of 31 billion cubic meters. Ukraine stores gas from Poland, Norway, Hungary, and other countries, which they receive even from the Caspian region, as well as liquefied natural gas (LNG), which comes to Europe from the United States. "The EU aims to phase out the use of Russian gas and reduce the share of fossil fuels in the energy mix. Ukraine can help achieve these goals," Grinchuk told Euractiv.

[Science] :
Two U.S. experts who inspected North Korea’s uranium enrichment facility at the Yongbyon nuclear complex in 2010 have analyzed recent images of a similar facility in the North and pointed out differences.  Stanford University professor emeritus Siegfried Hecker and Robert Carlin, a scholar at the ...

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The X-ray emission spectrometer at SPring-8 BL07LSU has recently been upgraded with advanced modifications that enable the rotation of the spectrometer with respect to the scattering angle. This major upgrade allows the scattering angle to be flexibly changed within the range of 45–135°, which considerably simplifies the measurement of angle-resolved X-ray emission spectroscopy. To accomplish the rotation system, a sophisticated sample chamber and a highly precise spectrometer rotation mechanism have been developed. The sample chamber has a specially designed combination of three rotary stages that can smoothly move the connection flange along the wide scattering angle without breaking the vacuum. In addition, the spectrometer is rotated by sliding on a flat metal surface, ensuring exceptionally high accuracy in rotation and eliminating the need for any further adjustments during rotation. A control system that integrates the sample chamber and rotation mechanism to automate the measurement of angle-resolved X-ray emission spectroscopy has also been developed. This automation substantially streamlines the process of measuring angle-resolved spectra, making it far easier than ever before. Furthermore, the upgraded X-ray emission spectrometer can now also be utilized in diffraction experiments, providing even greater versatility to our research capabilities.

The Materials Imaging and Dynamics (MID) instrument at the European X-ray Free-Electron Laser Facility (EuXFEL) is equipped with a multipurpose diagnostic end-station (DES) at the end of the instrument. The imager unit in DES is a key tool for aligning the beam to a standard trajectory and for adjusting optical elements such as focusing lenses or the split-and-delay line. Furthermore, the DES features a bent-diamond-crystal spectrometer to disperse the spectrum of the direct beam to a line detector. This enables pulse-resolved characterization of the EuXFEL spectrum to provide X-ray energy calibration, and the spectrometer is particularly useful in commissioning special modes of the accelerator. Together with diamond-based intensity monitors, the imager and spectrometer form the DES unit which also contains a heavy-duty beamstop at the end of the MID instrument. Here, we describe the setup in detail and provide exemplary beam diagnostic results.

Synchrotron light sources can provide the required spatial coherence, stability and control to support the development of advanced lithography at the extreme ultraviolet and soft X-ray wavelengths that are relevant to current and future fabricating technologies. Here an evaluation of the optical performance of the soft X-ray (SXR) beamline of the Australian Synchrotron (AS) and its suitability for developing interference lithography using radiation in the 91.8 eV (13.5 nm) to 300 eV (4.13 nm) range are presented. A comprehensive physical optics model of the APPLE-II undulator source and SXR beamline was constructed to simulate the properties of the illumination at the proposed location of a photomask, as a function of photon energy, collimation and monochromator parameters. The model is validated using a combination of experimental measurements of the photon intensity distribution of the undulator harmonics. It is shown that the undulator harmonics intensity ratio can be accurately measured using an imaging detector and controlled using beamline optics. Finally, the photomask geometric constraints and achievable performance for the limiting case of fully spatially coherent illumination are evaluated.

The BL17B beamline at the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility was first designed as a versatile high-throughput protein crystallography beamline and one of five beamlines affiliated to the National Facility for Protein Science in Shanghai. It was officially opened to users in July 2015. As a bending magnet beamline, BL17B has the advantages of high photon flux, brightness, energy resolution and continuous adjustable energy between 5 and 23 keV. The experimental station excels in crystal screening and structure determination, providing cost-effective routine experimental services to numerous users. Given the interdisciplinary and green energy research demands, BL17B beamline has undergone optimization, expanded its range of experimental methods and enhanced sample environments for a more user-friendly testing mode. These methods include single-crystal X-ray diffraction, powder crystal X-ray diffraction, wide-angle X-ray scattering, grazing-incidence wide-angle X-ray scattering (GIWAXS), and fully scattered atom pair distribution function analysis, covering structure detection from crystalline to amorphous states. This paper primarily presents the performance of the BL17B beamline and the application of the GIWAXS methodology at the beamline in the field of perovskite materials.

A broadband online X-ray spectrometer has been designed and commissioned at the SUD beamline of the Shanghai Soft X-ray Free-Electron Laser Facility, which can deliver both SASE and seeded FEL pulses to user experiments, spanning the photon energy range of 50–620 eV. The resolving powers of the spectrometer calibrated via online measurement at 92 eV and 249 eV are ∼20000 and ∼15000, respectively, and the absolute photon energy is characterized by an electron time-of-flight spectrometer. The high energy resolution provided by the spectrometer can differentiate the fine structure in the FEL spectrum, to determine its pulse length.

Electron cryo-microscopy image-processing workflows are typically composed of elements that may, broadly speaking, be categorized as high-throughput workloads which transition to high-performance workloads as preprocessed data are aggregated. The high-throughput elements are of particular importance in the context of live processing, where an optimal response is highly coupled to the temporal profile of the data collection. In other words, each movie should be processed as quickly as possible at the earliest opportunity. The high level of disconnected parallelization in the high-throughput problem directly allows a completely scalable solution across a distributed computer system, with the only technical obstacle being an efficient and reliable implementation. The cloud computing frameworks primarily developed for the deployment of high-availability web applications provide an environment with a number of appealing features for such high-throughput processing tasks. Here, an implementation of an early-stage processing pipeline for electron cryotomography experiments using a service-based architecture deployed on a Kubernetes cluster is discussed in order to demonstrate the benefits of this approach and how it may be extended to scenarios of considerably increased complexity.

BL19U1, an energy-tunable protein complex crystallography beamline at the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility, has emerged as one of the most productive MX beamlines since opening to the public in July 2015. As of October 2023, it has contributed to over 2000 protein structures deposited in the Protein Data Bank (PDB), resulting in the publication of more than 1000 scientific papers. In response to increasing interest in structure-based drug design utilizing X-ray crystallography for fragment library screening, enhancements have been implemented in both hardware and data collection systems on the beamline to optimize efficiency. Hardware upgrades include the transition from MD2 to MD2S for the diffractometer, alongside the installation of a humidity controller featuring a rapid nozzle exchanger. This allows users to opt for either low-temperature or room-temperature data collection modes. The control system has been upgraded from Blu-Ice to MXCuBE3, which supports website-mode data collection, providing enhanced compatibility and easy expansion with new features. An automated data processing pipeline has also been developed to offer users real-time feedback on data quality.

Characterization of crystallization processes in situ is of great importance to furthering knowledge of how nucleation and growth processes direct the assembly of organic and inorganic materials in solution and, critically, understanding the influence that these processes have on the final physico-chemical properties of the resulting solid form. With careful specification and design, as demonstrated here, it is now possible to bring combined X-ray diffraction and Raman spectroscopy, coupled to a range of fully integrated segmented and continuous flow platforms, to the laboratory environment for in situ data acquisition for timescales of the order of seconds. The facility used here (Flow-Xl) houses a diffractometer with a micro-focus Cu Kα rotating anode X-ray source and a 2D hybrid photon-counting detector, together with a Raman spectrometer with 532 and 785 nm lasers. An overview of the diffractometer and spectrometer setup is given, and current sample environments for flow crystallization are described. Commissioning experiments highlight the sensitivity of the two instruments for time-resolved in situ data collection of samples in flow. Finally, an example case study to monitor the batch crystallization of sodium sulfate from aqueous solution, by tracking both the solute and solution phase species as a function of time, highlights the applicability of such measurements in determining the kinetics associated with crystallization processes. This work illustrates that the Flow-Xl facility provides high-resolution time-resolved in situ structural phase information through diffraction data together with molecular-scale solution data through spectroscopy, which allows crystallization mechanisms and their associated kinetics to be analysed in a laboratory setting.

We describe an ultra-compact setup for in situ X-ray diffraction on the inelastic X-ray scattering beamline ID20 at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. The main motivation for the design and construction of this setup is the increasing demand for on-the-fly sample characterization, as well as ease of navigation through a sample's phase diagram, for example subjected to high-pressure and/or high-temperature conditions. We provide technical details and demonstrate the performance of the setup.

Zilch, a fintech company operating an ad-subsidised payments...

The company will locate a manufacturing operation in the Catawba Industrial Commons, creating 110 new jobs with an average wage of over $50,000 and investing $15 million over the next five years. It will provide specialized services for parts used in gas turbine engines produced by Siemens, GE, Alstom and Rolls-Royce.

The facility is now testing biodiesel fuel being produced by several companies in the region and from the harvest of crops growing around the landfill to test which ones grow best in the local climate while producing the best oils for biodiesel.

Chinese maker of products for the textile industry has located its first US manufacturing facility in Conover, creating 78 new jobs.

The more plant personnel who participate in your facility’s food safety audit, the better. These educational experiences allow your staff to engage with the audit process and improve their food safety knowledge.

The flavor producer is increasing capacity and adding technical capabilities.

Pall Membralox Microfiltration System equipped with ceramic membranes with gradient permeability technology plays a critical role in purifying valuable protein.

The Hormel-owned snack brand has installed solar panels to boosts its sustainability.

Once constructed, the facility will produce The Cheesecake Factory’scheesecakes and signature bakery products for its restaurants and other foodservice wholesalers, retailers, and distributors.

NuTek Food Science will product NuTek Salt at its new state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Fargo, ND.

ADM and InnovaFeed have announced plans to collaborate on the construction and operation of the world’s largest insect protein production site, in Decatur, Illinois.

Ingredion Incorporated has announced two new additions to its plant-based portfolio produced at the Company’s new pea protein manufacturing facility in South Sioux City, Nebraska—VITESSENCE Pulse 1853 pea protein isolate and PURITY P 1002 pea starch.

Merit Functional Foods, a solutions-based plant protein company, is pleased to announce that its new 94,000 square-foot facility in Winnipeg, Manitoba, is fully scaled to supply food and beverage customers with the highest purity pea and canola proteins available for use in plant-based applications.

Representatives of JTM Foods LLC and its financial partner Tenex Capital Management announced the expansion, joining Wichita leaders in the groundbreaking at ict21 Industrial District.

Milk Specialties Global has doubled its lactose production following the expansion of its west coast processing facility in Visalia, CA.