Bühler, Microsoft partnership: Enhancing digital, food processing technologies  

08 May 2018 --- A new partnership between Bühler and Microsoft seeks to enhance the food industry with digital technologies. These include minimizing toxic contamination, reducing food waste and increasing end-product quality across the whole food value chain.

“Today’s food value chains are facing tremendous challenges,” says Ian Roberts, CTO at the Bühler Group. “Digital solutions will allow us to improve food safety and integrity and reduce food losses and waste. They enable us to be more efficient in production. In fact, with intelligent implementation of our digital capabilities we will make a major step towards meeting our goals of lowering waste and energy consumption in the food value chain by 30 percent,” Roberts adds.

For the agriculture industry to meet the global quality demands of the future, sustainability in all aspects of agricultural production is key,” said Caglayan Arkan, General Manager Manufacturing & Resources at Microsoft. “Microsoft’s mission is to help leaders like Bühler take advantage of its data using our Azure cloud and Azure IoT technologies to accurately forecast trends in agriculture, improve food safety and provide better services for customers.”

The Bühler-Microsoft collaboration comes at a time when the global food industry faces increasing environmental and economic pressure. By 2050, the planet’s population is predicted to grow to nine billion. Providing sufficient nutritious food in a sustainable way is a major challenge we have only begun to address.

More than 30 percent of global energy goes into food production. However, around 30 percent of all food is lost or wasted, while 800 million people are starving. From today’s perspective, we continue to challenge the limits of our agricultural systems, which will need to supply an additional 265 million tons of plant protein by 2050.

It is Bühler’s declared aim, through smart partnerships, to create businesses that contribute to solving these challenges. “With the digitalization of the food industry we have a new, unrivaled capability we can bring to bear,” says Bühler CTO Roberts.

The showcases to be presented at the Hannover industry tradeshow cover the whole value chain from farm to fork.

Breakthrough sorting solution: Saving lives and increasing yields
Maize, the world’s main cereal crop, can be affected by aflatoxin, a naturally occurring toxin that is highly carcinogenic. 500 million people worldwide are at risk of exposure to it. It is estimated to cause up to 150,000 cases of liver cancer a year and contribute to stunting in millions of children. The economic impact on farmers, food processors and the economy is significant. Bühler will be launching a breakthrough sorting technology for maize, making a major contribution to addressing this urgent challenge. This revolutionary solution will be presented for the first time at Hannover Messe with a working demonstration.

PreMa: Intelligent storage and handling
85 million tons of cereal grains are lost in storage and handling every year. Reducing this loss helps our customers and contributes to safeguarding more of the food the world produces. PreMa is an intelligent silo monitoring solution to ensure grain is stored under the correct condition

Safefood.ai: Improving food safety through data-driven early warnings
Safefood.ai scans thousands of official databases, web pages, news and social media channels for events and rumors related to food safety. It identifies food and feed products affected and provides customized early warnings to food processors, enabling them to stay ahead of food safety risks.

Microsoft Manufacturing & Resources General Manager Caglayan Arkan adds: “Collaborations like the one between Bühler and Microsoft will be essential to feeding our world and fueling a better future for our natural resources and food production. With artificial intelligence and the cloud, we have the technology to address some of the biggest challenges facing the industry.”

And Bühler CTO Roberts concludes: “The digital revolution is a huge opportunity for the food manufacturing industry. It has the potential to bring beneficial changes along the entire value chain, improving safety, transparency and efficiency, and reducing energy consumption and waste. We are only scratching the surface of this potential. The partnership between Bühler and Microsoft will equip us with tools to address some of the key challenges the industry and the world faces.”

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