3 millennial innovations for Food Manufacturing 2030
We asked the latest cohort of Bakkavor Graduates "what will the food factory of the future look like?" The millennials were attending an innovation day at the National Centre for Food Manufacturing, as we supported the University of Lincoln inspiring future food industry leaders. “Millennials”, with a reputation for being digitally savvy, were shown the latest automation and robotics technologies before we discussed what will food manufacturing look like in 2030? There key ideas included:
1. Going digital on the shop floor
Unlike their baby boomer counterparts, millennials have grown up with digital technologies and are very much at one with their smart phone. One of the clear changes they see is the movement to digital manufacturing systems and the elimination of paperwork from the factory floor. The key drivers for the adoption of digital will be improved traceability, decision making and the overall equipment efficiency of a factory.
2. More robots
There are many repetitive manual tasks that will be automated as the cost of robotics and automation falls. From cakes to wraps, robots and collaborative robots will play a much greater role in our food production systems. A particularly interesting area of discussion was the potential impact of reduced human interventions on hygiene and the shelf life of products.
3. Flexibility is a requirement
But to do this, millennials recognised the need for flexibility within future food systems providing the opportunity for products, recipes and lines to be changed quicker and easier allowing flexible manufacturing and development.
Inspiring new technologies
At the National Centre for Food Manufacturing, OAL demonstrated how new technologies will shape food manufacturing. Demos included:
OAL Connected - Using automation to connect devices and remove paperwork from the factory floor. Tasks can be recorded digitally covering food safety, traceability, performance, productivity, recipe management, packaging and date security and ERP validation.
Steam Infusion - To demonstrate how new processing technologies can offer efficiency and product differentiation, the grads cooked up a broccoli and stilton soup with Steam Infusion. They could see first hand how the cooking process can eliminate burn on achieving a cleaner, more nutritional product with locked in flavours, colours and vitamins.
APRIL - APRIL (Automated Processing Robotic Ingredient Loading) our robotic chef is disrupting the way we handle and process raw ingredients by combining state of the art cooking and material handling technologies. The site of a five-tonne robot, cooking sauce, definitely inspired the graduates to the possibilities of robots in food manufacturing.
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Top three automation challenges facing food manufacturing
What are the top 3 automation challenges facing food manufacturers? As a company, we invest 8.2% of our turnover into R&D, so we’re keen to keep on top of the major trends in our industry. We conducted market research to establish what challenges food manufacturers are facing as they enter 2016 to ensure that our APRIL Robot Chef, a flexible fully automated processing cell, can provide the answers that manufacturers need. Here’s what we found; the top three challenges reported may not surprise you.
OAL Food Safety
1. Food safety & traceability
Unsurprisingly food safety and traceability tops the list of challenges that face food manufacturers. Food manufacturers have a duty of care to ensure that food is safe for people to eat and thus the ability of automation to ensure traceability is critical.
Through discussions with respondents, stricter regulations and complexity presented challenges to ensuring complete traceability through existing food production systems. Tracking product/ingredients through all stages of sourcing, processing and distribution with the complex nature of supply chains and sheer number of SKUs is no easy feat.
OAL has been developing solutions as part of their OAL Connected software to overcome these challenges whilst offering real-time data for both food safety and factory efficiency. A key aspect of this development is building the paperless factory. Paper systems do not offer the level of assurance to overcome the challenges highlighted and easy to use paperless control systems have been a cornerstone of OAL's work. Integrated product tracking with ERP systems through SCADA enables complete traceability of products from the first receipt of goods in, right through to dispatch.
OAL Packaging
2. Packaging
Packaging was the second most highlighted challenge and it's little surprise with the number of format changes and regulations that food manufacturers face. Packaging has always changed but 2013 saw the boom of healthy eating, and manufacturers have been under ever-increasing pressure to ensure that food packaging appeals to customers. This changing consumer landscape has raised issues in the flexibility of automated packaging systems to respond to change.
The rising number of packaging variations has heightened the risk of the wrong product being placed in the wrong packaging; a nut product with the incorrect packaging could have fatal consequences. Back in 2004, OAL was involved in the development of Autocoding with Tesco and Geest (now Bakkavor), and the introduction of 2D barcodes to ensure that every piece of product packaging is correct. This was a major step forward as 2D barcodes meant the lids, sleeves and packs could all be identified by a barcode scanner.
OAL has experienced first-hand the importance of flexibility and an ability to adapt to the changing packaging formats, working closely with customers to ensure compliance with retailers codes of practice. As the trend for packaging variations grows, they see this as a key area for continued collaboration to ensure packaging security.
3. Cost of implementation
Finally, in a very respectable 3rd position was the least surprising problem reported, Cost. The initial cost of implementing automated solutions is high but existing systems have often lacked flexibility. The flexibility of the systems is critical in allowing soft reconfiguration to accommodate evolving consumer tastes; attempts at previously achieving automation have often missed this key component resulting in costly white elephants.
APRIL the Robot Chef from OAL seeks to eliminate this issue of flexibility by using principles from Manufacturing 4.0 to deliver a truly flexible modular solution. Coupled with the cost of robotics and automation dropping because of strong adoption in other industries, OAL believes the challenge of the cost of implementing automation can be overcome.
Ready to get started? Get in touch with our team today!
About the survey
OAL contacted a wide range of food manufacturers and the results were based upon 97 respondents. Respondents varied in roles with a good cross section of line managers to business directors.
Achieving consistent dough production
In this mini-series, we take a look at the key production challenges bakeries face. First up, achieving consistent dough production.
Why is it important?
bakery line
The UK’s leading bakeries aim to produce a repeatable, high quality loaf, as efficiently as possible. At the beginning of the baking process flour is mixed with water and other ingredients to make dough. It follows that inconsistent dough production will inevitably lead to poor loaf quality downstream in the form of varying colour and texture. See the diagram below for a typical bread manufacturing process:
For bakers, being able to produce a consistent dough is integral to repeatedly manufacture the high quality loaves that their customers demand. Without consistent dough it also becomes almost impossible to optimise the remainder of the baking line process for quality, cost-effectiveness and consistency because of variances in the dough.
What are we aiming for?
Bakeries are aiming to minimise the variance of their dough in terms of ingredient ratios, consistency and mix energy. By minimising the variance of the dough, manufacturers can optimise the rest of the baking process to consistently produce a high quality loaf. This is challenging and manufacturers and invariably bakeries are reduced to applying on-line changes to ingredients to try and maintain some stability.
For instance, during the mixing phase, maintaining consistent temperature of the dough is imperative. If the temperature isn't right, the fermentation rate will be faster or slower during the proofing period, which will influence the volume of the bread and the colour of the crust.
What can we do about it?
It’s important to stress here that consistent dough is a complex challenge because of the wide range of factors that can lead to variances. OAL has undertaken a significant amount of root cause analyses of dough production to minimise these variances, including working with GE to build models that identify causality of such variances.
We have found the key drivers for consistency are accuracy and repeatability of ingredients feeds, temperatures, and understanding the role that moisture plays in the process. For instance, moisture content in the batched flour is largely influenced by the delivery air temperature and pressure. Hence the ability of a system to maintain the same temperature and pressure will have a direct effect on the varying moisture content of the dough produced.
OAL has helped bakeries and production plants identify and rectify the root causes of inaccuracies within their operations by analysing and stabilising these controlling variances. A major change has been to switch to vacuum transfer systems for ingredients.
Vacuum transfer of ingredients
OAL Group is a strong advocate of transferring ingredients under vacuum as opposed to blowing. The key benefit of vacuum transfer is the huge reduction in the amount of energy added during flour transfers. This directly results in steady, predictable development of the dough temperatures and more even proofing, in turn improving the consistency of crust colour and volume control.
Since 2010, OAL has been one of the most active suppliers of dry materials handling systems in the UK bakery industry. Over this period, we have commissioned over £30 million worth of new dry materials handling systems.