.png)
It's been a rough year for grocery shelves. Through the first half of 2026, there have been 162 food recalls, according to data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This puts 2026 on pace to exceed the 320 recalls posted in 2025, marking the sixth year in a row the number of annual recalls has increased.
You’ve seen the news reports: leafy greens, deli meats, frozen vegetables, and more, each one prompting a supply chain crisis. Some of those incidents have been unusually severe: outbreaks of cyclosporiasis, a parasitic illness often linked to fresh produce, have infected more than 28,000 people this year alone, a scale that has put food safety back in the national spotlight.
For consumers, a recall is a headline. For the manufacturers and co-packers behind the product, it's something far more expensive. According to PMMI, the trade association for the packaging and processing industry, the average cost of a food recall runs about $10 million, including everything from the physical logistics of pulling product off shelves to retailer penalties and liability exposure.
That figure doesn’t include harder-to-quantify costs like brand reputation. When one supplier's product turns up linked to an outbreak, buyers don't always stop at avoiding that one item. They start avoiding the brand, sometimes the category, sometimes the co-packer whose name they never even knew was on the label. One executive close to the packaging equipment industry put it plainly in a recent conversation: a single incident can trigger a "cascading effect," where a retailer or distributor quietly reroutes volume to a competitor rather than risk being associated with the next headline.
The lesson packaging and processing manufacturers are drawing from a year like this one is straightforward, even if the fix isn't: at $10 million a recall, and with incidents like the cyclosporiasis outbreaks showing how fast a food safety issue can scale, catching a problem while product is on the line is worth more than catching it after the product has shipped. Catching it early requires infrastructure built for traceability and hygiene from day one, not bolted on after an audit finds a gap.
Engineering for traceability
That infrastructure question has a regulatory deadline attached. The Food Safety Modernization Act's traceability rule, known as FSMA 204, requires tracking specific high-risk foods through the supply chain, with full compliance due by 2028. For manufacturers, that shifts the audit conversation. It's no longer enough to say, “We have a quality management system.” The follow-up question is where that system's data actually resides and whether it communicates with the rest of the equipment on the floor.
That's a harder problem than it sounds, and the recalls logged so far this year suggest plenty of manufacturers are still working through it. A modern packaging line might have dozens of barcode readers, vision systems, and sensors, each generating a data point about what passed through and when. Individually, none of that is traceability; it's just noise. It only becomes useful when it's unified into a single connected record rather than scattered across siloed systems that don't talk to each other.
Eplan: One source of truth, from design to documentation
Connecting those data points requires more than monitoring software. It starts with an electrical and automation architecture designed to support the sensors, controls and systems responsible for collecting production data. While operational platforms manage finished-product traceability, the engineering foundation determines how those technologies are connected, documented and maintained. That's where Eplan comes in.
Eplan's software is used to design and document electrical and automation systems for exactly this kind of high-complexity environment, where a multitude of sensors must work in concert. The software's real value shows up twice: once at initial build, when it manages that complexity, and again later, when the line inevitably needs to change.
That second moment matters more than it might seem. Packaging lines are constantly reconfigured for a new bottle size, fill volume, or label placement, and each change requires updating what the sensors track and how the equipment responds. Without a single accurate record, that means engineers must dig through stacks of drawings to figure out what's wired where. With Eplan functioning as a single source of truth, that lookup happens in a file, not on the shop floor.
Eplan also supports engineering documentation by maintaining records of specified electrical components, enclosure selections and associated technical data. This helps engineers and maintenance teams reference the intended design when equipment is modified, serviced or reviewed for compliance. Those engineering specifications also inform the selection of physical infrastructure, including enclosures designed to meet the hygienic and environmental demands of food and beverage production.
Rittal: Hardware built for hygienic, high-stakes environments
From design and documentation to physical implementation, Rittal hardware helps ensure specifications carry through to the finished system. Hygienic enclosure design addresses the realities of food and beverage environments directly: frequent washdown, sanitizing agents, and, in categories like condiments and sauces, corrosive, acidic conditions. Motor control centers and panels extend that protection to facility-wide packaging line control.
The newer piece of that hardware story is what's happening at the edge. Manufacturers are increasingly placing servers directly on the plant floor, housed in enclosures that integrate climate control, power distribution, monitoring, and security into a single, ready-to-deploy unit. Rittal's edge infrastructure provides the physical environment for industrial computing and data systems that can collect, process and store production and traceability information closer to the line, depending on the applications deployed.
That capability matters most when the line is under scrutiny during an audit or an active recall investigation. This proximity can help reduce latency and improve access to critical production information, particularly when manufacturers need to investigate quality issues, respond to audits or identify potentially affected products. Rittal's expanding portfolio in this space — including enclosures purpose-built for housing IT equipment in industrial environments and new power distribution capacity — reflects a broader industry shift toward treating plant-floor data infrastructure as core equipment rather than an IT afterthought.
Better together: Where the two meet on the line
Each piece, individually, solves part of the problem. Together, they close the loop: Eplan ensures a system is designed, specified, and documented correctly, while Rittal provides the physical infrastructure engineered to turn that design into a reliable, real-world system.
Consider a mid-sized co-packer running high-speed primary packaging lines for a national grocery brand, a familiar scenario to packaging equipment manufacturers serving that segment. A vision system flags an inconsistency in seal integrity on one line. Because the vision system is part of a connected automation architecture designed and documented using Eplan, engineers have a clear record of how the equipment, sensors and controls are integrated. Operational traceability systems can then collect and associate production data with specific batches, lots and time windows, helping the co-packer identify and isolate potentially affected products.
Because the servers hosting that data sit in a Rittal enclosure on the plant floor rather than off-site, the co-packer can pull the record in minutes, isolate the affected product before it leaves the facility, and avoid becoming the next recall rather than managing the fallout after the fact. It's a scenario increasingly common among manufacturers serving large retail accounts, where a $10 million mistake is measured in relationships as much as dollars.
There's a secondary benefit worth a brief mention too: well-designed infrastructure tends to run more efficiently, and energy efficiency remains a quiet priority for manufacturers even as sustainability messaging has cooled in some corners of the industry.
See it in person
For manufacturers looking to see this approach in practice, Eplan and Rittal are showcasing it at The Better Together Experience on Monday, October 19, 2026 from 1-8 p.m. in Chicago, IL, with a hygienic design focus that speaks directly to processors and primary packagers, alongside the software side of the story. It's a chance to see the two halves of this "better together" approach — the design record and the physical infrastructure — side by side, rather than as separate conversations.
