Page 21 - Baking Europe Journal - Winter 2022

TECHNOLOGY
AUTOMATION/AI 21

“Sugar reduction is a very signifi cant challenge for
a bakery producing sweet baked goods.”

manufacturing practices in both in-line spectroscopy, spectral imaging can be used to help control or change
bakeries and their supply chains, and chromatography, thereby processes to enable manufacturers to
off ers important advantages to allowing for real-time access to adapt more easily to changes in the
increasing the resilience of the sector physicochemical parameters of industry.
enabling it to better prepare for the baking processes and baked
future, which may include products. In this way smart baking One major barrier to the
contingencies for unprecedented has the potential to improve both implementation of new technology,
events and global challenges. output performance of the entire however, is the perception of its
bakery plant and its research and prohibitively high set up costs, when
Smart manufacturing development operations perhaps a carefully planned, staged,
Smart manufacturing for baking strategic investment programme
(Smart baking) can be considered a Smart baking, like smart would yield an much more
novel combination of leveraging manufacturing , can, essentially be encouraging ROI over a longer term.
2
Industry 4.0 concepts together with described as the digitisation of the
process analytical technologies (PAT) baking process at all levels from The fi rst step towards smart baking is
already used widely for product product design, supply chain, to swap analogue based systems for
quality and process assessment in, for production and distribution, through digital equivalents, to enable the data
1
example, the pharmaceutical industry. to sales activities. This enables bakers to be more accessible and more
Industry 4.0 methodologies (Fig. 1) to have access to rich, detailed data quickly; this may include advanced
are designed to achieve a data-rich, of each step of a baking process for technology such as sensors, robotics
interconnected and highly automated subsequent analysis and processing and augmented reality.
form of baking using PAT, which through the use of advanced data
includes the implementation of modelling technology, such as Improved process controls
advanced sensing facilities such as artifi cial intelligence (AI). This data The underlying technology driving a

Figure 1: A schematic image depicting the Industry 4.0 data-rich, interconnected and highly automated form of smart
manufacturing.

BAKINGEUROPE Winter 2022/2023
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