Bühler is set to unveil ground breaking digital technologies that include minimizing toxic contamination, reducing food waste and increasing end product quality across the whole food value chain as part of a new partnership with Microsoft.
The new digital solutions and services will be presented at the Microsoft booth at Hannover Messe 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 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% 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.
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, unrivalled capability we can bring to bear,” says Bühler CTO Roberts.
