Page 38 - EngineerIt August 2021

AUTOMATION AND CONTROL

Food and beverage industry must

look ahead to move forward

By Ferdie Fortuin, Sales Manager – General Industry at Danfoss Drives South Africa

ood and beverage businesses Industry 4.0 intelligent drives help change challenges into
worldwide are under immense opportunities
Fpressure to meet the demands of In order to thrive in today’s world, food plants need to be able to scale up time and time
both an increasingly competitive market again – quickly and efficiently - and one way of successfully executing this is through the
and a growing world population. And use of intelligent drives.
the pandemic has certainly highlighted “In the Industry 4.0 network, intelligent drives that feature smart sensors and predictive,
the need for greater agility, process preventative maintenance play a critical role,” he states. “This type of solution has proved
efficiency and sustainability across the to help cut 38 percent of energy wasted, boost food production by 60 percent, and
entire supply chain. eliminate 33 percent of food loss during the production process.”
In order to move forward, Intelligent drives can connect securely to other elements within the network, including
businesses within this sector need to PLCs, sensors and the cloud, and also embrace the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)
ask themselves the difficult questions, concept to connect wirelessly to smart devices.
for example, will their operation be
able to handle the 60 to 70 percent Danfoss powers food plants worldwide
increase in food production needed to While adding intelligence to a system can often be a complicated process, requiring
meet population growth by 2050? Can additional sensors and components, a Danfoss intelligent drive already features smart,
they cope with a 27 percent increase built-in sensor technology. This means that it is able to act not only as a sensor, but also as
in confectionary products demand by a sensor hub and a controller, collecting data from both internal and external sensors.
2025, for instance? Or, from a food
security point of view, can they help
eliminate the 33 percent food loss that
occurs during production, when more
than 820 million people are going
hungry globally?
Will the dairy chain specifically
be able to cope with surging
requirements, with a 35 percent
increase in milk demand forecast
by 2030? To put this into greater
perspective, the International Farm
Comparison Network’s (IPFN) Dairy
Outlook Report describes a future
scenario where the average cow will
need to produce more than 20 percent
more milk, putting pressure on dairy
farms to increase output by over 50
percent,” Fortuin explains.
“In order to keep up with rapidly
changing market dynamics and build
greater resilience, transformative
change is needed to allow food
producers to scale up productivity,
while at the same time bring down
costs and improve efficiencies. All of
this can be achieved by embracing the
right technology.”

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