Get ready – a new ice age is coming. It’s already transforming the world of frozen desserts from a familiar landscape of cones, bars, and sandwiches in established flavours to a place where even the most amazing dreams become
real ice creams.
This isn’t the stuff of fantasy or science fiction, but a reality in which digitalisation enables unprecedented innovation, creativity and control while optimising quality, hygiene, and productivity. Food and beverage producers, including those specialising in ice cream, are already moving towards transformative digital technologies like big data, advanced analytics, AI, and the Industrial Internet of Things.
As part of the fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0, it is predicted that dairies will soon become automated “smart factories”, boosting yield, uptime and quality while reducing waste, energy consumption and costs. Drivers for Industry 4.0 within the dairy industry are not only the increased consolidation of global markets and heightened competition between international players. Factors like environmental responsibility, a rise in consumer demand for product variety and differences in characteristics are all significant drivers.
Tradition vs technology or knowledge informed by data?
“Digitalisation is impacting all our lives on a daily basis – and that goes for ice cream too,” says Elsebeth Baungaard, Portfolio Manager and ice cream expert at Tetra Pak.
When compared with other industries – including food and beverage as a whole – some ice cream producers may feel a bit hesitant about going digital or automating their production processes. This is perhaps because ice cream making is, in many ways, a traditional craft that incorporates a degree of artistry and tradition.
But traditional know-how needn’t be sacrificed to technology. Digitalisation is mainly about information, and the more information you have about your production process, the better your ability to make informed decisions relating to quality, consistency and safety. That goes for everything, including ice cream.
Digitalisation empowers complex processes, exact production parameters and repeatability, which are crucial to producing a wide variety of ice creams in large amounts while maintaining high product quality. The result is a broad range of mass-produced ice creams that consistently taste and look great while securing optimal standards for food safety.
Digitalisation in practice
From small, artisanal ice cream businesses to major international producers, ice cream makers of all sizes are improving their operations by incorporating digital tools into their production processes. Let’s look at two ways digitalisation can upgrade ice cream production.
Ice Cream Line Insight™
Making ice cream requires technology that enables continuous production, so the ice cream won’t melt. This means reducing downtime is crucial to optimising production. Digital connectivity and data help make sure machines are up and running their best. For example, larger companies are benefiting from Ice Cream Line Insight™, which provides reports from hundreds of data points spread across your production line, so you receive information not only about overall line performance, but also deep-dive analyses on each machine, empowering improved efficiency, reduced waste, and secured food safety.
Tetra Pak® Ice Cream Robot Filler M1
We’ve introduced the world’s first collaborative robot specifically designed to automate small-scale manual ice cream filling. For ice cream makers, who produce more variety with lower-capacity lines, changing over from one product to the next can significantly eat into production time. The Tetra Pak® Robot Filler M1 is a game-changer, solving difficulties associated with the manual production of high-quality ice cream, not just in terms of product quality and production costs, but also ergonomics and operator safety.
“There are many different levels of digitalisation. For smaller producers, our collaborative ice cream robot, or ‘cobot’ enables precision, repeatability, and flexibility for low-capacity lines,” says René Sorensen, Automation Software Designer at Tetra Pak.
What does the future hold?
We will see a need in the future for all ice cream makers, both big and small, to go digital. While feeling hesitant about making a major change in operations is understandable, to stay competitive and avoid costly mistakes, producers have much to gain by looking at all the available facts rather than at isolated or individual opinions. Simply put, more data equals better decision making.
The main point of digitalisation in commercial ice cream production is getting accurate data and sharing it with the right people to achieve a common understanding of operations. Typically, a machine operator may have a different perception from a floor manager, quality controller or CEO, but if they all have access to the same data, they can all be on the same page. Accurate, prioritised data is a tool for ice cream producers, enabling them to make the most effective decisions for improvement in a timely manner. Rather than replacing ice cream traditions, it empowers them to be more efficient, consistent, and profitable. In this way, digitalisation can combine the knowledge that comes from experience with the right data, delivering value where it is important.
