Three ways robot chefs will reduce capital costs in chilled food manufacturing
Traditionally fully automated manufacturing cells require significant capital investment because of the complexity of the processing equipment required. Dedicated robotic chefs, like APRIL, will significantly reduce both the initial capital investment and ongoing running costs shortening return on investment.
The APRIL robotic chef uses state of the art cooking and material handling technologies to process ingredients with real care. Robots have a proven track record for cost cutting in other industries and APRIL chefs will reduce the capital costs of chilled food manufacturing in three key ways:
Utilisation of high-value assets
Factory footprint reduction
Use of simplified equipment
1) Utilisation of high-value assets
By increasing fixed asset utilisation food manufacturers can increase revenue and return on capital. By way of example, typically cooking vessels must all have the same high-value processing devices on each kettle. If I have 10 kettles each with a homogeniser, sadly the nature of batch processing means the homogeniser will typically have a utilisation of 5%. APRIL systems process in parallel allowing utilisation to exceed 70%, for the same application only one homogeniser is required. Not only does this save money initially but also on ongoing maintenance costs.
Traditional Processing Vessel Arrangement
2) Factory footprint
The smaller the factory footprint the smaller the costs of building and running the factory. Within food manufacturing, chilled high and low care areas have a high cost per square meter. APRIL manufacturing cells will typically be less than 40% of a traditional system footprint. This means a considerably less expensive chilled food manufacturing facility to build and run over time.
3) Simplified equipment
In many food manufacturing processes significant investment is required in order to automate processes due to complex equipment and product routing. This not only is costly but creates significant cleaning and maintenance challenges. Robot chefs can simplify these processes minimising the complexity and equipment used, in doing so reducing investment and ongoing maintenance, cleaning costs and adapting to future product lines. The reliability and maintenance of the Robotic chef is staggering with projected downtime of less than 15 minutes in a year and little more than 1 hour’s maintenance. The APRIL robotic chef uses dedicated vessels requiring no pipework or valve matrices or pumps making it very easy to clean and avoid cross contamination issues.
Robotics chefs are coming on stream now, make sure you enjoy the benefits. If you would like to learn more about APRIL sign up for our launch event on Thursday 28th April 2015 at the National Centre for Food Manufacturing, Holbeach UK or if you would like to talk to someone please call one of the APRIL specialists at OAL.
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APRIL robot development wins £60,000 grant
We are pleased to announce we have received a £60,000 Agri-Tech Growth Grant for the development of our robotic food processing system, APRIL.
The grant will be used to further develop APRIL, our fully automated robotic food manufacturing cell that will boost production, efficiency and improve the quality of food produced.
Click to read more about the story on Foodproductiondaily.com
“OAL is transforming the food manufacturing industry through their technology. The APRIL system will kick-start the industry’s move towards fully automated production lines, allowing food to be produced quicker, with less waste and greater precision.”
Mark Reeve, Chairman of the Eastern Agri-Tech Growth Initiative
A full size demonstration system is being built at the National Centre for Food Manufacturing part of the University Lincoln in Holbeach, Lincolnshire.
APRIL wins University of Cambridge Open Innovation Food & FMCG pitching event
Our game-changing food processing innovation APRIL won over judges from Tesco, General Mills and Mars at the 4th Food & FMCG Innovation Pitching Event.
The University of Cambridge event took place at Food Matters Live In London, where we pitched APRIL (Automated Processing Robotic Ingredient Loading) to the esteemed group of judges. The judges recognised APRIL’s ability to change the way we manufacture food by offering “chef-standard” food whilst significantly reducing production costs.
APRIL is the first of its kind and represents a step change in food processing; enabling parallel food processing and the emulation of a professional chef on an industrial scale.
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.