For many, conjuring up an image of bakers is one who leans on traditional methods to bake bread, lovingly rolling the dough by hand or mixing ingredients in a bowl. Of course, for the industrial baking world, this image has since made way to large scale production facilities, with several lines running at once. For giant operators like Grupo Bimbo who employ 149,000+ people worldwide and drew in approximately 399.88 billion Mexican pesos in 2023, according to data from Statista, continually running lines is imperative.
The IoT industry is already radically transforming industries from healthcare to industrial manufacturing, bringing to the fore smart wearables or cobots to assist with accurate readings or upping manufacturing capacity, and smart homes and cities garner a lot of attention for how it directly impacts the lives of consumers.
The baking industry, however, might not immediately be an obvious industry that has already begun to be reshaped by IoT, but is well on its way as bakers are already exploring the limits of adopting and implementing technologies like 5G networks and the Cloud.
Just as the overall aim in smart city projects are for the quality of life to be improved for residents achieved through a myriad of ways, like improving the flow of traffic or effectively monitoring water and energy resources, key metrics for industrial bakeries to be operating successfully includes consistent product quality and uniformity, while reducing waste and improving profit margins. Loaves of bread that are sold on supermarket shelves are neat and not misshapen.
Equipment from temperature probes to smart ovens are utilising huge amounts of data in order to understand how and where issues during production occur, and require IoT connectivity.
For Stephane Fjelddahl, Founder of Falk Thermal, an understanding and need for a solution that continuously monitored dough temperature spawned his own solution; the BakePulse. BakePulse is a probe, equipped with hardware from Arduino, within a wifi card.
“The probe is placed inside the pipe of the dough pump where it sees the stream of continuous dough,” explained Fjelddahl. “Readings are taken every 10 seconds and data is sent to the Arduino Cloud solution, where it can be viewed through the Arduino IoT app on smartphones/web browsers.”
Fjelddahl said that this was a “basic” solution but piqued his own interest in IoT, as creating the solution required intensive research into this space. “I came up with the concept of BakePulse where a web app will tell the COO how his bakeries throughout the world are operating, with a kind of health metric for each production line.”
The vision is for BakePulse to rely on several sensors to feed it data, with some sensors being vision based.
Outside of the production facility, the greater emphasis placed by consumers on tracking and traceability has meant harnessing IoT technologies and 5G networks to be able to provide information on what ingredients went into a loaf of bread.
A 2021 trial conducted by Vodafone tested out a 5G sensor system in a field to provide a farmer with rich insights into the crop they were growing, satisfy conscious consumers with information on transparency – as the discerning consumer is not going away, any time soon – and leverage 5G to provide insights and data during the baking process.
Enabling farmers to access data drawn from real-time monitoring of crops in the field can go some way towards reducing food waste at this stage in production. Bakers can leverage 5G, hybrid Cloud and AI technologies and Blockchain to create the ideal loaf.
The application of these technologies in the baking industry goes to show that any industry can be transformed with the right technology, bringing benefits to bakers, farmers and consumers, so everybody’s happy.
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