R2-D2 or me too?

Steve Land, industry segment manager at automation specialist Festo, believes that rising demand for healthy foods and an increasing niche demand for premium functional foods will drive production technology.

And the need for better control of active functional ingredients and expensive resources such as energy and water will help raise production technology and process control.

"For the majority of food and drink manufacturers this will mean the systematic removal of the human variable from anything that impacts the end product quality," he suggests. Land also predicts that increasingly stringent control of processes such as recipe formulation, traceability, production processes, packaging and distribution, will lead to pharmaceutical industry-type quality standards for some manufacturers.

"Quality management systems such as the pharmaceutical industry's Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) system, supported by low-cost radio frequency identification (RFID) tagging, will become widely adopted by the food and drink industry," says Land.

David Bradford, md of robot supplier RTS Flexible Systems, also predicts the increased use of automated handling in the food factory of the future. "Instead of seeing islands of automation among manual processes, it will be more usual to see islands of manual operations amongst an automated production line. There will always be some tasks for which only the flexibility of a human being will do - but such tasks will become increasingly specialist."

ROI expectations must change

However, he says, expectations for return on investment (ROI) will need to change if the industry is to benefit fully from the opportunities that robotics and automated handling can offer. We'd like to see the industry working together to develop improved models for return on investment," says Bradford.

"I'd like to see a future where retailers work with manufacturers in a supply chain in much the same way as car manufacturers do with their suppliers. At the moment, short-term contracts set up an in-built insecurity and are a real barrier to longer term investment. Retailers could reduce product costs by enabling their suppliers to invest long-term in automation.

"Soon there will be very little that can't be automated. More and more apparently impossible handling tasks will be solved through innovative gripper technology and vision systems. Slippery hot pasta sheets, sticky glacé cherries, fragile cooked poppadums - we've already done it.

"If we want to have cheap food in large volumes prepared under maximum hygiene, automation is essential. There is no reason why, with increase in memory capacity and speed, much of the human touch cannot be duplicated."

One of the complaints about many of today's robotic and automation systems is that they still owe too much to their car industry history and have not yet been truly adapted for food processing. So how might the food robot of the future look?

Roger Harris, regional sales manager at Fanuc Robotics UK, envisages the development of individual mobile 'robot units' that are battery or fuel-cell powered, wireless, completely waterproof and that have fully-fledged 3D vision.

"They will talk via wireless ethernet and download their individual work-loads at the start of their working period. They will be loaded with 3D maps of their work environment to enable remote identification of individual work stations. Inductive strips in floors and walls would allow robot units to constantly re-charge their batteries on the move via 'evanescent coupling'. And they will be protected by laser beams which if broken will halt their movement."

Intelligent robots

Robots of 2020 will be intelligent enough to work at the side of conveyors, handling all manner of food products, says Harris. And their grippers will be guided by vision to enable them to handle soft malleable products. They will also be used to re-stock shelves in supermarkets.

"At the end of their working period the robot units will return to the robot storage area where they will connect themselves to a docking station to be cleaned. They could un-dock and connect to their individual solar or wind-powered charging station."

It seems a shame to interrupt these dreams, but Bob Lloyd, simulation manager at engineering and automation consultancy AMTRI, says that in 2020 the problem won't be the lack of advanced technology but the lack of will to invest in it.

"I don't think the food industry really knows where it is going with automation at the moment. There are products out there such as robot handling and people are buying them. But nobody is pushing it beyond that.

"The food industry is getting risk averse. The supermarkets dictate what happens, which means that the food companies are very cash strapped and not going to invest in automation." Instead, they expect their equipment suppliers to take the risk and develop automation equipment and systems for them, says Lloyd. But the equipment makers won't because they don't see a guaranteed market, he argues.

"The food industry all seems very 'me too'. They want a new system so they go and buy what their competitors have got. And so the development of automation in the food industry only proceeds at the speed of one or two suppliers. By 2020 I suggest there probably won't be any more automation than we have now."

But it isn't just automation and robots that the food industry seems reluctant to explore. According to Professor Bronek Wedzicha, head of the Proctor Department of Food Science at Leeds University, the industry is generally very conservative about embracing any technology.

"The food industry at large - not the Nestlés and the Heinzs, but the majority of the smaller companies that make up the industry - don't know the benefits to be had from technology.

"The obvious one is minimal processing. But minimal processing is to do with hurdle technology - the numerous small steps that are needed to make food safe, rather than one huge step. In other words you don't just pickle your food or zap it with high temperature, you develop a combination of treatments that does the trick. It is understanding how to do that that then becomes the new technology."

And so the slow process of borrowing technologies from other industries will continue to be the way forward for the food industry in 2020, suggests Wedzicha.

"We are going to see more technology transfer from non-food applications to food applications," he says. "There will need to be much more cross-pollination between different industries. I would put my money on finding technologies for making food as close to unprocessed as it can be, yet with the right preservation."

Kaarin Goodburn, general secretary of the Chilled Food Association, agrees. She believes there is a need to take a fresh look at preservation and heat treatment technologies. "We need to be pushing the boundaries of current approaches to microbiology based on risk. We need to re-evaluate current thoughts on thermal processes ... The current science of heat treatment is 30-40 years old.

"Better, gentler heat treatment is the Holy Grail. If we can extend shelf-life without knackering the product it will mean less waste, better quality - and we could see off imports."

Vending from micro food factories

"As anyone working in the food industry knows, fresh product tastes better than a product whose quality has been compromised to give shelf-life," claims Adrian Marshall, director, Crafty Tech, a developer of custom production machines.

"Current 3D printing technologies such as 'stereo lithography' are able to make arbitrarily shaped components on demand from wax, resin or sintered metal. In 2020 I see a similar approach being used for 'micro food factories'.

"These will be vending machine-sized units in public places that manufacture stunningly fresh food products for immediate consumption from stable components in less than a couple of minutes.

"Some progress in this direction has already been made with an 'instant chip' vending machine that re-hydrates and extrudes dried potato powder into a flash fryer, producing French fries 40 seconds after payment. And we are working on a 'micro process' to make cake in just 90 seconds.

"To achieve this speed of manufacture, conventional large-scale manufacturing processes will have to be turned on their head and there are challenges in implementing all a factory's functions, including food and fire safety and refuse collection, all within a 2m³ cabinet!"

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