THE BHLER NETWORKING DAYS

THE BHLER
NETWORKING DAYS

Johannes Wick, CEO Grains & Food, Buhler Group

uhler and Bosch Connected Devices and Solutions, two

experts in the areas of the Internet of Things and food
process technology, are joining forces. The companies have
decided to expand their research and development partnership.
Contractual proceedings to form a commercial partnership were
completed on August 22, 2016 at the occasion of the Buhler
Networking Days.

The cooperation provides great opportunities to leverage

Bosch know-how in electronics, sensor technology
and software for the food processing industry. The
two companies successfully cooperated in a two-year
research project to integrate cutting-edge Bosch microelectro-mechanical systems sensors into food production
technology.
The results are very promising: Individual rolls in rotating
machines can now be equipped with wireless sensors to
measure in real time temperature and vibration during the
production process. This allows monitoring and optimization
of the end product through better alignment of the rolls.
Operators also benefit from predictive maintenance services,
reducing down-time and operating costs. First applications
from this intensified cooperation will be launched in 2017.
Following our successful R&D partnership, we are
pleased to take the next step to form a commercial
partnership. We are excited to utilise this partnership to
create process solutions and services that improve yield and
performance at reduced operating costs for our customers,
stated Johannes Wick, CEO Grains & Food at Buhler.
Thorsten Muller, CEO of Bosch Connected Devices
and Solutions says, We are not only optimizing our own
worldwide manufacturing base, we are also actively seeking
to work with partners like Buhler to build a value creation
network beyond company boundaries and turn Industry 4.0
into reality.
58 | September 2016 - Milling and Grain

750 millers who provide food

to 4 billion people daily met in
Uzwil, Switzerland, to assess their
industry's future direction

Stefan Scheiber, CEO of the Buhler Group

ow to feed nine billion people healthily and

sustainabily? Buhler addressed this challenge, together
with key customers, scientists and partners at its first
Networking Days in late August in Uzwil, Switzerland.

We take the responsibility of the food and feed industry

for a sustainable world very seriously. It is time to step
up and make a difference, says Stefan Scheiber, CEO of
Buhler Group.
Around 65 percent of global water consumption and
25 percent of all energy use is related to food and feed
production. The world population is still growing and
more than 30 percent of all food is wasted.
Developed countries suffer from obesity while an
estimated 840 million people suffer hunger.
Feeding over nine billion by 2050 healthily and
sustainably poses a huge challenge for the agricultural
systems and the entire food industry.
Furthermore, even todays production of animal
protein is not sustainable. Only 40 percent of vegetable
proteins land on our plates, with the rest ending up in
the stomachs of livestock or as food waste. Despite all
efforts and political climate agreements, no turnaround to
a sustainable economic set-up and grain value chain has
been achieved so far.
Its time now that the private industry steps up and
makes a difference, says Mr Scheiber.
Buhler has made the commitment to address this
challenge globally, with its key customers and
partners at its newly established Buhler Networking
Days, where around 750 leaders from industry and
science are discussing megatrends that are shaping
the grain-processing industry: nutritional trends,
sustainability, food and feed safety, and the Internet
of Things (IoT).

THE BHLER
NETWORKING DAYS

PRESENTATION

THE BHLER NETWORKING DAYS

CAN WE FEED 9 BILLION PEOPLE

SUSTAINABLY BY 2050? (ABRIDGED)
by Ian Roberts, Chief
Technical Officer at Buhler
Group in Uzwil, Switzerland

an we feed nine billion people

sustainably in 2050 - that is the
question? If I look at the audience
we have here, it is hard to imagine a
better group of people to discuss this
with.
In fact, we have been looking at
how many lives we touch across the
whole grain value chain together,
and I think its possible, that in this room, we touch the food for
four billion people a day with our products and services. This is
absolutely staggering.
It is a remarkable achievement but it comes with a burden.
Almost a quarter of the greenhouse gases emitted are associated
with agriculture. Almost 70 percent of the worlds water usage
is through agriculture. One-third of the worlds energy goes into
food production.
But, one-third of the food is lost or wasted: so one-third of
one-third of the worlds energy is utilised to produce waste. And
one-third of 70 percent of the worlds water is utilised to produce
waste.
We must solve a massive efficiency problem across the value
chain if we are to become sustainable.
Nine out of 10 of the worlds warmest years have been in this
century. So we are not on a good track. And that comes back to
this food waste problem. The FAO has identified food waste, if
it were a country, as the third biggest contributor to greenhouse
gases after the industrial power houses of China and the USA.

60 | September 2016 - Milling and Grain

Hunger

At the same time as we waste food, over 800 million people go

to bed hungry and 159 million people are stunted.
Stunting relates to diet. It relates to the first 1000 days of life,
from conception to two-years-of-age. If you have inadequate
nutrition, your mental development is stunted, your physical
development is stunted and you have immune deficiencies.
And you do not recover; it is not reversible. There is nothing
you can do about it. You are condemned for life, from your first
1000 days.
On the other side is an unpleasant fact that 2.8 percent of global
GDP is spent treating deceases directly related to obesity, such as
the early onset of Type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease and all
of associated ailments.
At the same time as GDP grows we have increased demand for
protein, and an estimated protein gap by 2050 of 265 million tonnes.
This is a vast amount, when arable land is decreasing, soil
erosion is an issue and we have major inefficiencies in conversion
rates for protein from our livestock.
Currently, there are 50,000 deaths per year result from antibiotic
resistant bacterial infections - just in Europe and the USA. We
heard here today that this will be a bigger threat to the health of
mankind than cancer.
Evidence suggests that two-thirds of the antibiotics that are
produced worldwide go into animal feed, and these include
antibiotics such as the very common penicillin, which has been
identified as critical for human health and safety.
And the other part of this problem is that the antibiotic pipeline

is drying up. We only have had two new antibiotic species created
or discovered since the 1990s.
It is inevitiable that the human population will reach nine billion
somewhere around 2050, whether it will get to 11 billion is a
moot point, and it whether reaches this in 2045, 2050 or 2050 is
irrelevant. We have to prepare a food system that enables us to
feed nine billion people; and to do it sustainably.

Business responsibility

We cannot rely on politicians. We cannot rely only on academic

experts advising politicians, nor on the great forums such as the
Cop 21 which are very important. They are clearly not solving the
CO2 problem.
We have a business responsibility, and it is great one. GDP will
grow 40 percent between 2010-20, which means our markets will
grow. Over 24 percent of the world population is middle-class,
which means that people will continue to value processed food,
they will want new products. And this is good for business.
However, inequality has been growing since 1980. The gap of
what the top one percent owns when compared to the rest of the
population closed up to 1980 but it has now broadened and it gets
wider and wider. The 80 richest people on earth have the same
wealth as the three and a half billion poorest.
This drives frustration because in an age of social media, there
is nowhere to hide between the haves and the have-nots. The
wealth gap is visible at all times and news spreads like wildfire
with communications reaching all places. This does not only lead
to frustration, it leads to conflict and we have seen this first-hand
around the world in recent years.
We currently have 65 million people forcibly misplaced by war,
genuine refugees; the highest number since the Second World War.
We have to drive equitable growth and it has to be in the hands of
business to create employment and wealth. This is why we believe
that it is as an industry that we have to step up to the challenge. We
have to be clear that we are developing sustainable businesses by
leading for future generations.
This is not about ignoring profit, nor about ignoring business
success. A resilient value chain is one where people can create
wealth along that chain in the absence of subsidies and with a fair
price of resources.
And it is a business imperative.
Milling and Grain - September 2016 | 61

THE BHLER NETWORKING DAYS

F
We believe that the four themes of our Networking Days
2016 are important if we are to bring impact as an industry:
To talk about nutrition; about food safety; about the impact on
sustainability and about the incredible opportunity we see in the
disruptive power of the internet of.

The alternatives

If we go back to the protein challenge, what are the alternatives

to meat?
Pulses are a fantastic sustainable option, not to replace meat, but
to close the gap. We could make vegetable protein steaks.
We all love meat, and everyone enjoys eating meat as it has a
wonderful flavour and is a great experience. It is important in our
lives. The experience of dining is critical for family and friendship.
Insects are a fantastically sustainable resource, they consume
organic waste turning it into protein and that protein is valuable
and can be used it for poultry, for aquafeed and for human food.
Legislation is coming.
Algae brings huge opportunity. This is one of the reasons why
we partner so closely with academic institutes.

Food safety

Reduce risk, cleaning efficiency, reducing the cost of cleaning.

If you think about it, a lot of time is lost when a line is not
producing because we are cleaning. What we should be able to do
is clean efficiently by design and by intention, to ensure we are
utilising lines to produce.
In the mid term we must develop technologies for non-thermal
kill steps that do not damage nutrition.
If we understand the role of bacteria we can be selective.
Instead of killing everything, we can just kill the pathogens, and
then reinforce the other bacteria that are beneficial.
There is clearly opportunity in this space,

Can we eliminate mycotoxins early in the value chain?

This would have a nutritional benefit, a food security benefit

and clearly stop us from processing things that we are going to
throw away.

The digital age

The big opportunity comes from the digital age, if you look
at all of these amazing companies that we have seen disrupting
industries in the last few years such as Uber, which now
transports more people on earth than anyone else but without
owning a car. What this and other companies have done is they
have used the digital age to utterly disrupt a value chain.
What is the opportunity we have if we work together to disrupt
the food value chain to bring about greater efficiencies?

I think it is very important that we look at the low-cost sensors

now available on a massive scale, at data storage that has gone
down in price, at cloud solutions with massive connectivity and at
todays massive processing power.
We are beginning to bring solutions into the space, be it smart
sensors in rotating parts like rolls, be it in the form of product
quality controls such as particle size distribution or be it remote
access or a complete digital interface which allows customers to
work in the digital world effectively and efficiently.
I have three nice examples in the areas of industrial internet;
Drones, 3D printing and robots.
What is the beauty of drones? You can fly these inside machinery
and you can inspect things in places you would never want to send
a person. They can do crop analytics using hydrospectral cameras
to give us an understanding of what is happening at harvest, if there
are diseases to deal with for example.
Imagine what 3D printing could do? They can print alternative
layers of both plastic and metal. This means you can print
electrical connectivity. You can print functionality into parts that
you couldnt traditionally.
This last one is from the robot world. It is an arm with seven
axis of freedom. It doesnt need a safety cage, it works next to
you. If you want to program it you move its wrist and arm, you
make him do the job by moving it through all of the pieces,
directions and motions. This instructive motion becomes the
programme and no programmer is required.

Collaboration

These opportunities are enormous. As a result we transformed

our innovation model to a collaborative model, working with
customers and suppliers for innovation.
What an incredible forum we have here to innovate and cocreate. We have fantastic global academic networks, business
model innovation think tank at HSG, innovation think tanks,
World Systems Centre at ETHZ, , integrated nutrition food
centre at EPFL, Unitech working with 10 universities across
Europe. We are also building this up in China and in India and
working with our employees, the start-up world, and brilliant
young people - 65 percent of whom are going to do jobs that we
dont even know exist today.
So if you ask me if we can feed nine billion people sustainably
by 2050, the answer is an unequivocal, Yes! Of course we can.
We cannot do it without a highly-efficient grain value chain and
I cannot tell you what that grain value chain looks like. That is the
challenge we face. It is clear we will have new technologies, it is
clear we need new business models to drive disruption, it is clear that
we need transparency across the value chain and it is certain that we
will need a massive degree of collaboration to make it happen.

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Visit our web site www.nextinstruments.net or email us at sales@nextinstruments.net

62 | September 2016 - Milling and Grain

www.entil.com.tr

July 2015 | 63

THE BHLER NETWORKING DAYS

THE BHLER
NETWORKING DAYS

INNOVATIONS

TUBO
THE TUBULAR PUSH

CONVEYOR

In terms of flexibility, the new TUBO conveyor system sets

new standards in plant engineering and was specifically
designed for use in the food industry with its high
requirements in terms of hygiene.
This uniquely versatile machine, which operates on a push
rather than a pulling process, attracted much attention at the
recent Buhler Networking Days in Uzwil and in fact, won
the events most innovative prize with over 20 percent of the
attendees voting in favour.
In comparison to conventional conveying systems, energy
consumption can be considerably reduced and the bulk material
can be conveyed far more gently.
In order to achieve consistently high product quality and
efficient production processes for the processing of bulk
materials such as grain, rice, break-stock, bran and flour,
the products must be conveyed in the production plant as
rapidly as possible, but at the same time also gently and
hygienically.

Bhlers TUBO is an innovative conveying system that sets

new standards for the conveying of bulk materials, says the
company. In contrast to todays systems, the bulk material is
conveyed, without the need of a pulling-cord, in a closed pipe
using TUBIT pusher elements.
Thanks to three-dimensional plant layouts, plant engineering
is considerably more flexible.
Furthermore, additional advantages with respect to sanitation,
energy efficiency and gentle conveying ensure sustainable
investment pay-off in a very short time.
More creative freedom in bulk materials conveying:
Flexible plant engineering - minimum space requirements
through three-dimensional conveying
Highest sanitation standards - residue-free product
conveying without cross-contamination and segregation
Highest energy efficiency - minimal friction and fewer
transfer points required
Gentle conveying - fewer broken kernels and higher yield

Tubo won the

award for most
advanced
innovation and
the team that
designed it
celebrates with
CTO Ian Roberts

Dr Eliana
Zamprogna
stands next to
the Tubit units
from the Tubo
which help to
push product
along the
conveyor

64 | September 2016 - Milling and Grain

Digital Microwave Moisture Measurement

Improve Quality - Reduce Waste - Cost Effective
NEW

Hydro-Mix
A simple and cost effective way to accurately control moisture and to improve the quality
of your nal product is to mount a Hydro-Mix moisture sensor into our new ducting system.
Specically designed for grain, rice and pulses and easy to install into
existing ducting, our system diverts a portion of the main ow of
material across the sensor head providing the most
accurate, real time moisture measurement
available.

enquiries@hydronix.com

www.hydronix.com

Milling and Grain half page horizontal 190 x 132 plus 3mm bleed.indd 1

26/07/2016
Milling and Grain - September 2016
| 6510:11:18

Advanced Feature Dryer

The Complexity
of Balancing
Sanitary Drying
and Efficiency

FLATBREADS &
FLEXIBILITY
FOR THE MILLING
INDUSTRY
THE BHLER
NETWORKING DAYS

CASE STUDY

Based on PesaMill technology, the CombiMill process

allows whole-wheat flour for flatbreads, dark and
standard flours to be produced using the same milling
system.
Flatbreads are an important staple food in India,
Arab countries and many African nations. The flour
used for flatbreads has specific properties, such as high
water absorption. Indian Atta flour, for example, is
traditionally made on stone mills. However, these mills
consume vast amounts of energy and require frequent
maintenance.
In addition, they are not suitable for hygienic processing
because abrasion of the stones and binding agents may
potentially contaminate the product. For these reasons,
Bhler developed PesaMill.
This high-compression mill grinds grain using a highpressure shearing action, which generates relatively high
temperatures. Compared with the stone mill, it has higher
yields, improved food safety standards, requires less
maintenance, and consumes significantly less energy.

Has Now Been

Mastered
The Quick Clean Advanced Feature Dryer
from Extru-Tech, Inc., with industry-leading
fines handling, ease-of-cleaning access
and other key engineered sanitation
features, has elevated food safety to the
next level. Put your process in compliance
and well ahead of industry standards.

CombiMill

Contact a dryer specialist today at

785-284-2153 or visit us online at
www.extru-techinc.com.

P.O. Box 8
100 Airport Road
Sabetha, KS 66534, USA
Phone: 785-284-2153
Fax: 785-284-3143
extru-techinc@extru-techinc.com
www.extru-techinc.com

ET-280A.indd 1 66

| September 2016 - Milling and Grain

1/7/16 2:11 PM

Now, Bhler has successfully combined the PesaMill

with traditional roller mill technology in a single milling
system. The result is the CombiMill, which offers a high
level of flexibility.
In addition to the whole-wheat flour typically chosen
for flatbreads, it is also ideal for the manufacture of other
products, such as various types of dark and standard
flours.
This means that milling companies will now be able
to successfully set themselves apart in the market by
producing different kinds of end products with a single
milling system.
The first CombiMill machines are already up and
running in the Middle East, North Africa and the Indian
subcontinent.
See more from the Solutions Space at Networking Days on page 90