The major potato processing market players are constantly collecting, analyzing, and sharing digital data across their enterprises to monitor and control operations, for gaining elevated food safety, optimizing product quality, improving production efficiencies, and increasing yields. All these rewards come from focusing on information sets that can be turned into useful, actionable knowledge.

The next step in the big data saga will emerge from improved data integration throughout the food supply chain, from farm to fork, with each component collaborating to share information smoothly and safely beyond the walls of their entity to benefit the overall process.

Each spud processor needs to control the product quality they deliver to their customers while maximizing their process yield. In this respect, the sector players are increasingly looking for equipment that achieves performance parameters while easing use. The technology suppliers must deliver intuitive machinery, enabling a new operator without a technical background to learn how to use the equipment in less than an hour.

Among the common requirements, tech suppliers get from potato processors is the ability to leverage data analytics software to understand product quality and process trends better, to optimize the efficiency of the line operation.

Data from a smart machine can improve the system’s operations, conducting self-diagnostics tasks, sending smart alarms, performing auto-learning functions, and more. Integrating smart equipment on a line enables data from one system to improve other systems along the same production line. In between machines, unique sensors on the line, such as at the out-feed of a freezer or before packaging, can share the data they collect to monitor and control a wide variety of process parameters.

Outside individual machines and line integration, delivering data to the enterprise level allow the large-scale analysis of ‘big data.’ The ease of harnessing large amounts of valuable data is rapidly improving and, with larger data sets, comes the opportunity to develop more valuable insights and actionable information.

To be an efficient smart device within the Industry 4.0 framework, the flexibility to support a variety of data formats and connectivity protocols is essential. Proprietary formats are unlikely to scale.

“Today’s sophisticated equipment often features advanced software that enables universal connectivity via OPC-compliant infrastructure. Many modern systems support integration with virtually any factory automation systems from any manufacturer, in addition to Modbus and Ethernet/IP devices and the creation of CSV and database files. Whether the data is collected off-line, on the plant floor, or remotely via connections to the factory’s MES and SCADA systems, processors that can collect, analyze and share big data are empowered to make more informed decisions,” Marco Azzaretti, director of marketing at Key Technology explains.

You can read the rest of this article in your complimentary e-copy of Issue 1 of Potato Business Dossier 2022, which you can access by clicking here.