Rachael Wakefield, Business Development Manager at CENSIS writes how IoT technologies are being applied to the dairy industry and sparking conversation
Humans have been making cheese for thousands of years – the earliest evidence of cheesemaking, and the production of other dairy products, dates back to 5500 BC. Quite incredibly, the basic principles of the process have remained broadly the same over that time.
Of course, new methods and technologies have been created to make the process more efficient, safer, and able to deliver repeatable quality. But there is a significant difference in digital capability between processors, especially the large and the very small.
There are more than 700 varieties of cheese produced in the UK by some 380 businesses, a significant number of which fall into the latter category. These artisanal producers create diverse types of high-value cheese in small batches, usually with minimally instrumented equipment. The question is, as the world around embraces more technology, can a digitised workplace help the artisan process and how can they begin to explore the potential benefits at a reasonable cost?
To address this issue, over the last year or so, we have been working with a number of small businesses in the dairy supply chain through CENSIS’s Milk Round technology accelerator, exploring the potential application of IoT technologies to help streamline tasks that are currently carried out manually and to glean more insight out of processes to help decision-making.
Each of the projects is part of the Digital Dairy Chain, a multi-partner project led by Scotland’s Rural College, aiming to transform the dairy sector and uplift the rural economy in south west Scotland and Cumbria. Funding support has come from UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) flagship Strength in Places Fund.
IoT is cream of the crop for Appleby
One of the cheese producers we have been working with is Appleby Creamery, an award-winning, small batch cheese producer based in the Lake District. The business wanted to explore how IoT could be used to monitor some of the equipment in the factory. The most important questions the creamery had were around how much the temperature varies in the chillers and the amount of water used during pasteurisation at its site in Eden Valley. These are very modest questions for an IoT-enabled system to rapidly address; but, for the creamery, they are potentially transformative.
For compliance purposes, cheese has to be stored at certain temperatures during different stages of the process. This, however, comes with a degree of risk – for example, doors open too long in various stores affects quality and can render the product unusable. The cost of this is significant – not only in terms of energy use, but also the multiple checks that need to be carried out by staff every day.
At Appleby, there are at least eight areas where temperature variation has quality control impact. We installed IoT-enabled sensors primarily in the chillers and some in other areas to continuously monitor temperatures and look at the energy use of specific equipment. Automated data collection and reporting saves staff time to focus on more valuable tasks and removes the need to manually record readings on a clipboard, before uploading them to compile reports and for digital storage.
Alongside energy, water consumption – and its tracking – is increasingly important for net zero reporting. Appleby also wanted to better understand its water consumption and whether investing in solar or thermal water heating would be economically viable. IoT sensors are now helping to monitor the energy consumed in heating water and overall consumption.
The most impactful outcome from the collaboration with Appleby is that IoT has supported a curiosity-driven approach to operational change. It’s opened a conversation in the team about what might be possible, because the tiny smart devices on a low-cost LoRa network are easy to move about and re-purpose. While some of the monitoring is very short term, other uses are exploring where long-term investment decisions might be made for more robust and permanent applications of the technology.
Remote milk remote monitoring
On the farm production side of things, being able to save staff time is even more valuable than for small processors. Many small farms pasteurise some or all of their own milk as they diversify their dairy offerings, from milk to farm-made cheese, yogurts, and other products.
In another project with an organic dairy farm, which provides milk for vending machines, we have been exploring how IoT can be used to monitor pasteurisation. With a team of only two on the farm, they spend a lot of time checking the pasteuriser so they do not miss time windows. They wanted to know if they could remotely monitor the equipment, as well as automating its controls, avoiding the large cost of replacing a perfectly working pasteuriser they understood well, with something already automated.
We worked with a local electrical services company to create and install a new food-grade temperature probe and automated valves, which were connected to a mobile phone app we created using an app developer tool. This allowed the farmer to remotely open and close the valves, and monitor the pasteuriser’s condition.
Automating the process saves the team huge amounts of time, allowing them to explore their long-held idea of creating an organic cheese-making facility on the farm. It also provides them with more evidence of the pasteurisation process, which can be used for compliance purposes.
IoT is bearing fruit for another dairy producer
For another SME processor of a variety of milk-based products, IoT-enabled sensor retrofitting is a potential solution to a different type of challenge. The business has just created a new kind of product at the request of a supermarket chain, which it includes the use of fruit compote.
During production, the fruit compote is added as a manual process that, if the compote store is not topped up at the right time, can result in missing ingredients, unusable product, and unnecessary waste. Vitally, this can mean its tight profit margin is not met.
While the production process is already automated, much of the equipment lacks instrumentation. The business wanted to explore non-invasive ways of finding out if the fruit flavouring was on the verge of running out. While this may sound simple, it is actually not as straightforward as you might think – the retrofitted IoT system has to somehow measure compote in the flow lines and enable production to be halted in good time if a top-up is required.
Identifying where monitoring can be implemented highlights the demand for low-cost solutions to digitise existing processes, particularly in operational environments.
IoT may be a relatively mainstream technology, but in the world of small manufacturing businesses – of which the dairy supply chain has many – there are still lots of opportunities to use the technology where it could deliver most value. While there are many feasibility studies and pilots, these are only of value if customers are aware of and know how to engage with their own supply chain to render these into longer term operational solutions.
And therein lies the biggest opportunity for potential suppliers to cheesemakers and the dairy industry, more generally. There is a large gap in the market for businesses familiar with IoT, which can think creatively about different aspects of the sector, helping producers to drive digital change and inform their future investment decisions.
Dr Rachael Wakefield is a Business Development Manager at CENSIS, the innovation delivery organisation for digitalisation and enabling technologies. She has a technical background in materials biodeterioration and environmental sensing, as well as a broad area of interest in sensing technologies for remote and challenging environments, such as agritech and marine applications.
Author: Rachael Wakefield, Business Development Manager at CENSIS
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