Uniform, high quality is important to bakeries in a highly competitive market. This project aims to analyse the automated bread roll baking system and use a demonstrator to alert the operator to potential quality deviations at an early stage – eliminating sub-standard products and reducing food loss.

The smart quality assurance system will give bakery employees access to data-based insights into process control, so consumers can enjoy the same high quality with every batch.

The young start-up company DatenBerg is participating in the project as technology provider.

Final report summary
The first step of this project was to create a flow chart of the process steps on the automated production lines for buns and pretzels. This revealed from the outset that the infrastructure for data collection was not available as the bakery had not yet invested in sensors and software packages. Only in the dough mixing process was data obtainable from the recipe steering software.

The chart was used to uncover problems in production, which were then ranked and evaluated due to their business impact and technical difficulty. Most problems were due to variations in the way operators carried out manual tasks, leading to inconsistencies in processing and the final products.

Use cases were developed to address these challenges. The focus was on finding simple ways to address these problems with visual inspection systems and data monitoring/automated analysis software.

During this project, Bäckerei Hatz gained insights into the potential for optimising processes. As a technology provider, DatenBerg found that SME bakeries may lack the necessary data pool for unleashing the potential of artificial intelligence for production improvements.