Swiss food tech firm Bühler introduces blockchain-ready solutions

Swiss food technology giant Bühler this week introduced blockchain-ready solutions that aim to reduce food poisoning rates and enhance production efficiency at the Microsoft booth at the Hannover Messe.

The solutions include

• Laatu – A technology to reduce microbial contamination in dry goods
• Tubex Pro – A smart, self-optimizing scale system that produces a constant flow of production data

Laatu, Bühler explains, can destroy more than 99.999% of Salmonella with minimal impact on the internal structure of the food, thereby maintaining its quality and nutritional value. The cost-efficient and environment-friendly solution is ready for the spice market and its implementation for other dry food markets is under development.

“Laatu can be used as a powerful tool in food safety auditing as its real-time monitoring system captures processing parameters, dates, times, and product batches. With a potential link to blockchain, it is capable of providing an accurate and secure audit trail for food producers and all players in the supply-chain,” Bühler added.

The second solution, Tubex Pro, is a smart process scale system that self optimizes its measuring algorithm according to product flow characteristics and the plant environment. Integrated into Bühler’s advanced Yield Management System, it can improve production efficiency and yield, and unlock a new degree of traceability and transparency.

According to the official release, these solutions are connected to the Bühler Insights IoT platform, which is powered by Microsoft Azure, which will help ensure a new degree of traceability and transparency along the food value chain.

Bühler said that introducing verifiable food safety solutions into processing lines that can be linked to blockchain can significantly reduce the human and financial cost of food poisoning globally.

Nicolas Meneses, Laatu Project Manager at Bühler, said that the integrated food safety and yield management solution will allow capturing key details such as date, time, batch, and input parameters used on a specific product and store this data on the blockchain.

“This enables customers to track, for example, that a batch of peppercorns has been processed using the Bühler Laatu technology,” Meneses said. “Using blockchain you can see if a food ingredient has been properly processed in seconds rather than days – and with a high degree of certainty. You can then quickly take action. This helps reduce the number of people exposed to potentially unsafe food and also to cut food waste as the specific batch can be traced.”