Bühler and Microsoft Partnership to Present New Digital Solutions for the Food Industry

Bühler and Microsoft have partnered to find digital solutions for challenges such as minimizing toxic contamination, reducing food waste and increasing end product quality across the whole food value chain.

The new digital solutions and services will be presented at the Microsoft booth at Hannover Messe trade fair in Germany.

“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%,” Roberts adds. For agriculture to meet the global quality demands of the future, sustainability in all aspects of agricultural production is key,” said Caglayan Arkan, general manager manufacturing and 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% of global energy goes into food production. However, around 30% 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.

Through partnerships, Bühler aims to create businesses that contribute to solving these challenges. “With the digitalization of the food industry we have a new, unrivalled capability we can bring to bear,” says Bühler CTO Roberts.

Exhibits to be presented at the Hannover industry tradeshow cover the entire value chain, from farm to fork:
Gamaya decision support and automation services help farmers optimize their use of water, chemicals, fuel and manual labor, while reducing environmental impact and improving the quantity and quality of produce. Examples of analytics include the mapping and classification of weeds, early diagnostics of plant disease, pests and nutrient deficiencies, as well as prediction of yields. Enabled by a combination of technologies including hyperspectral and satellite imaging, data fusion and artificial intelligence, it improves the efficiency and sustainability of farming businesses through smarter decisions.

Bühler will be launching a breakthrough sorting technology for maize, which will be presented for the first time at Hannover Messe with a working demonstration. 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.

In addition, as 85 million tons of cereal grains are lost in storage and handling every year, reducing this loss 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 conditions.

TotalSense is a mobile rice analyzer that provides for quick and objective quality control. A quality report can be obtained by submitting a photo of a rice sample, including an analysis of broken and discolored rice grains. TotalSense reduces the time for rice quality checks by up to ten times.

Safefood.ai scans thousands of official databases, webpages, 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 and 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.”