Supermarket Perimeter - February 2023 - 54

Cheese
Artificial
intelligence
By Andy Nelson
THE ANCIENT PRACTICE OF MAKING CHEESE is getting some help
from a very 21st
century technology.
Amalthea, a leading global provider of goat cheese and organic
cow cheese based in the Netherlands, is now using cloud software
specialist Infor's integrated artificial intelligence (AI) solution to help
improve cheese quality and yields, build customer loyalty and boost
sustainability.
For every 1% increase in yields, Amalthea expects to save
approximately 500,000 euros, according to Infor. Amalthea plans to
significantly increase its manufacturing capacity in five years to meet
the high demand for more cheese types and innovative solutions such
as its CleardMilk®
formula, a process by which it can extract whey,
cream and other components from raw milk. This helps lessen waste
and improve sustainability practices.
Headquartered in the Netherlands, Amalthea makes cheeses from
top-quality goat milk it receives from about 50 goat farmers who are
members of the Amalthea Cooperative of Goat Farmers.
One of the biggest challenges for dairy manufacturers such as
Amalthea is that milk composition varies across farms and seasons,
according to the company. There is no standard recipe that can be
applied across all milk batches to achieve consistent quality and yield.
Close monitoring and steering of the cheese production process is
required to create cheese consistency so that customers stay loyal and
Amalthea maximizes yield potential.
" Our customers require consistency in the cheese we produce, " said
Joris Aarts, chief financial officer at Amalthea. " The big challenge is that
milk is the raw material used to produce cheese and, by nature, is very
unstable and inconsistent over the seasons. Infor Coleman AI helps us
make cheese production as stable and predictable as possible, in terms
of quality and yield, so that our customers are happy. "
For each of its cheese batches, Amalthea used to set a target yield
based on the practical or past knowledge of production. When a cheese
batch deviated from the target yield or the right target yield wasn't set,
factory operators had to take action and make changes to production
to make the process more efficient. In the past, production issues were
identified by manually processing data and analyzing it on a weekly
basis. With approximately 240,000 liters of milk processed each day, it
wasn't optimal to wait a week or sometimes a month to get insights and
make necessary system changes to optimize yield.
54 - FEBRUARY 2023
" In the past, we had to do these milk yield calculations manually,
and we were only able to do this once per week, or sometimes once
per month, so it was too late, " Aarts said. " On top of that, we were not
able to calculate the yields per batch. We could improve milk yield
somewhat, but now with Infor Coleman AI, we can not only see the
yields per cheese batch in real time, but it also gives us direct insight
into what contributors are causing a higher or lower milk yield so the
operators can directly act on it. "
In 2020, Amalthea modernized its ERP with Infor CloudSuite Food &
Beverage and leveraged the power of Infor's cloud technology platform,
Infor OS, to solve a critical milk yield business problem.
This was previously hard to tackle because of outdated and
disconnected applications, data silos and lack of time and resources,
according to Amalthea. The modernization formed the building blocks
to create AI-driven applications quickly and efficiently. Amalthea's
AI-driven yield deviation detection and explanation is now fully
automated - from data collection and processing to presentation.
Amalthea is utilizing Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage throughout
its supply chain, from the reception of milk to the cheese warehouse. It
interfaces with and helps automate production systems in the factory,
such as weighing units and processing tanks. Infor technology also
has helped Amalthea improve the speed and efficiency of its financial
closing process from weeks to days.
supermarketperimeter.com
Amalthea
Amalthea expects
both quality and
yield improvements
from its new hightech
partnership.
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Supermarket Perimeter - February 2023

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