The core value of food processing companies is to produce high quality products that are fit for human consumption. Food processing companies are facing several challenges: increasing quality demands, a larger product variety that needs to be produced in a flexible way, traceability of origin, a constant pressure on costs and delivery times, personnel costs, difficulties to attracting specialised personnel etc. Awareness in food companies of the ‘need to’ and ‘benefits of’ digitalisation is increasing.

Integrating innovative sensor technologies in the food production processes in combination with an optimized usage of available data offer significant opportunities towards real time process control, inline product quality control including raw materials and process optimization. Even though food companies understand the importance of digitalisation and the hunger to digitalise is present, the path to digitalisation, however, is a lot less clear to many of them. One of the main bottlenecks to take the leap towards actual implementation is that the return on investment is in many cases not easy to calculate and often there is no immediate economic return as the added value of the investment is more future oriented.

The integration of innovative digital technologies throughout the production system and technological developments within the Industry 5.0 context, such as data analysis and artificial intelligence, offer great potential for real-time process and quality control of ingredients/products and an optimization of production processes to transform the production equipment to a flexible, responsive and adaptive system, while also taking into account the human centric aspect that includes training and skills development for workers as ‘end users’ of the digital solutions. To this end, the adoption and implementation of innovative digital solutions in the agri-food industry will enhance and support the economic resilience and adaptability of this industry. Data driven digital solutions are expected to bring numerous benefits to the food industry such as increased efficiency, flexibility and productivity, loss reduction, improved transparency, traceability and overall business performance, more information and added value for their customers, etc. At the same time, these digital solutions have the potential to disrupt the traditional agri-food industry by changing existing business models and potentially crowding out successful ones. For SMEs, which are the backbone of this industry, this poses a particular challenge and requires a step-by-step, sober approach.

Current challenges the agri-food companies are facing and where digital solutions and data driven processing can provide an answer are related to:

• Safeguarding and monitoring hygienic processing and quality control
• Traceability: more and more higher standards are desired on traceability of (food) products. Not only from a food safety point of view, but also from conscious consumers who demand to be able to know where (different parts of) their food comes from. With support of more digitalised processes, it should be easier to enhance the traceability and even use this as a unique selling point.
• Flexibility: the demand of consumers and therefor wholesale and retail changes more rapidly than ever, forcing the food processing industry to become more and more flexible. Not only in volume, but also in products and specifications. Digitalisation should make it easier to be more adaptive to changing demand. The Covid 19 crisis has put more emphasis on this need for flexibility, not only in relation to demand, but also in relation to resources, both material and human.
• Labour: finding (enough) skilled employees is not easy. Next to that the available labour force is relatively expensive. Through digitalisation some parts of labour where employees are hard to find can be substituted by automated processes. This will probably lead to a shift of labour (from manual processing to managing ICT-driven systems), more than a decline of labour.
• Sustainability: efficient use of resources, limiting food waste and creating value from side streams.
• Digitalisation can make process ‘smart’ and providing data on use of resources and allowing for the exploration on how to optimize this.
• Identifying and realizing new business concepts / models (in case the “traditional sales channels” will become ineffective).