Challenge

Large industrial bakeries face the urgent need to reduce gas.
In Europe, this is caused by the rapidly increasing gas prices, and increasing CO2 emission regulations. Without gas reduction the bakeries cannot keep their products profitable and product margins stable. In addition, the scarcity of expert bakers and factory operators causes a risk for product quality and product consistency. Also in the United States, CO2 emission regulations and the need for consistent and high-quality products are hot topics.

Together with our customer AMF, a manufacturer of high-speed industrial bakery equipment, we enable those large industrial bakeries to tackle the challenges and become future proof.

Technology

We designed the Sustainable Oven Service (SOS), a one-year service where we work together with AMF’s customers to improve their baking processes and oven performances. Key in this service is the intensive two-month optimization program, focusing on improving the oven configuration, the operator/baker habits, and process throughputs.

It starts by connecting the ovens to the AMF cloud platform, where all oven data is stored in an Influx time-series database. Then, we collect benchmark data for one month to build a mathematical data model of the oven: a digital twin. We use this digital twin to simulate various scenarios and calculate valuable insights, such as “looking at the total amount of energy consumed by the oven, how much energy is actually absorbed by the product itself and how much is lost to its surroundings?”.
Next step is to connect to our rules engine (built in Python). This automatically generates recommendations for the baker to further improve the baking processes. For example, to change temperature setpoints, adjust vapor exhaust settings, or reduce idle time. And during the entire trajectory, an experienced AMF oven specialist monitors the oven data to give additional expert recommendations.

To get the recommendations to the end-users, factory operators controlling the ovens in the large industrial bakeries, we’ve built an Angular web application with an intuitive user interface. The operators can monitor all aspects of their ovens and are notified of recommended changes. Each time they accept or deny a change, we ask for a brief explanation and log this into the database. In the future, we can use this data to train a machine learning model, so that we can generate even better recommendations.

Impact

Looking at a specific case of one of AMF’s customers, we managed to achieve significant results in less than three months. On average, this large industrial bakery reduced their gas consumption and CO2 emissions by 22,4%, while producing 7,48% more products. 
On an annual basis, this means they will save 137.916 Kg of CO2 emissions on just one oven, which equals the average yearly CO2 emission of 17 households combined. 
On top of that, the knowledge of the bakers and operators is gradually stored in the database, so that AMF’s customers can ensure a high quality and consistency of products, even in times of expert scarcity.

With more and more focus on sustainability and waste reduction in customer partnerships, the SOS goes beyond savings and efficiency. We’re very proud that it has won the prestigious Las Vegas IBIE Best in Baking award in 2022.