Platform for the food and beverage industry
"Cooperation is necessary if we want to be top in the world"
The Flemish food industry is fully innovating to strengthen its international position. Cross-sector collaborations are a means to innovate even faster. Three food companies from West and East Flanders - Soubry, Barry Callebout and Vandemoortele - have therefore joined forces. They want to learn from each other how best to automate their production process.
The food industry is an important sector in the Flemish economy, and it is making the transformation to Industry 4.0. The importance of data is noticeably increasing in this. "In order to optimize the production process, we must be able to respond to changes in the environment. Then it is important that we monitor all parameters and extract the right value from them to keep our final product stable. That process is becoming more complex, also because our range continues to expand," says Maaike Minnaert, innovation manager at chocolate manufacturer Barry Callebaut. The demand for a more varied assortment has been going on for some time. The customer is a lot more demanding than before. Vandemoortele also notices this. "Our range is expanding, but the end product must always be top quality. In addition, demand is rising and so we need to be able to produce faster," continues Tom Sabbe, production manager at Vandemoortele. "To answer these questions, we are looking for more efficient processes with an adapted role for the operator. Automated in-line controls can then be a tool."
To investigate whether measurements within those processes are of sufficient quality, the Flanders' FOOD spearhead cluster initiated the Autoprocess project with the support of VLAIO. "This project led to an intense collaboration between three food companies in which we were able to gain new insights and achieve accelerated innovation. In the end, we all have the same goals and objectives. We want to save costs while strengthening our competitive position," Sabbe states. Such innovation projects have other advantages: they are good for the image and important for knowledge building within a company. "If you want to attract young talent, you always have an edge as an innovative company. A number of jobs become more technical, since you automatically come into contact with new technologies. That requires different skills but makes a job more challenging. Moreover, we also want to do knowledge assurance here. Before, all the experience was with the operators. Today, there is a lot of turnover, so we have to make sure that we keep the know-how available to be able to deploy new people faster," Minnaert continues.
In addition to this project, Vandemoortele and Barry Callebaut are also setting up partnerships of their own. "What is important in every partnership is that good agreements are made beforehand. The partners with whom you work must be of a similar level and have common ground, but at the same time sufficiently different so that you can really learn from each other. The Autoprocess project was already a success and with the food sector we must continue on this path. Innovation and co-creation go hand in hand," Minnaert concludes.
