Changing eating habits and preferences, accelerated by a pandemic, demand different product designs and SKUs. Start-up food companies are increasing their market share with innovative new products. Added up, all of this continual competition in the food space is causing pressure for brands of all sizes for the rapid iteration of food products and their processes.
A new application is emerging that helps food companies deal with all this change, something that at once tracks consumer demand and product details to provide actionable insights for brands in their operations and with their supply chain partners. This new tool is the digital twin.
IBM is one company investing in the digital twin application as software for food companies and manufacturers. From their perspective, a digital twin is a virtual model designed to accurately reflect a physical object. Informed by data, the virtual model can be used to run simulations, study performance issues and generate possible improvement scenarios, all with the goal of developing valuable insights – which can then be applied back to the original physical object.
Transparency becomes increasingly important as consumers seek healthier ingredients and knowledge of food origins. Some brands provide details on their working conditions, plans for a smaller carbon footprint, sustainable packaging design, or community benefits as reasons to purchase their products. The digital twin improves the responsiveness of food brands by gaining deeper insights via consumer- and market- feedback data from multiple sources. Organized data helps food companies reformulate recipes, formats, or product designs in response to those signals.
At BMO’s 15th annual Global Farm-to-Market conference in 2020, Mike Duffy, CEO of New Hampshire-based C&S Wholesale Grocers noted how the ongoing pandemic made it clear that technology will play a key role in efficient and flexible supply chains. Duffy added ‘it is important how you increase collaboration with all your [supply chain] partners. How do you get to better connectivity, forecasting, and faster decision-making? [There has been] a lack of visibility of products moving through the supply chain. There is a big disconnect from demand signal to production [response]. How do you shorten the cycle time to make manufacturing more responsive to shifts in consumer demand so that there isn’t obsolete or excess inventory?’. It is the goal of digital twin software to provide actionable and product-specific information responding to changing demands from consumers or supply chain partners.
Leading food companies (and rising start-ups) are building a framework with their suppliers and end-customers in an integrated response system facilitated by the digital twin. It allows them to gain the insights to produce products or modify them. For example, the digital twin can estimate modifications with IoT feedback from retail, foodservice, or digital consumer surveys. Digital threads incorporate a range of information and benchmark performance to identify potential opportunities. It simulates the impact of changing raw materials or packaging, factors that may see rising market preference. As part of the support function for the food company, the digital twin more accurately validates production with real-world supply chain and operations information.
For automation leader Siemens, the digital twin helps the food sector become more flexible to drive sustained innovation through the timely use of information. The physical and digital are integrated for continual improvement of products through process updates. Siemens’ software manages data security, protection, and privacy as required, along with transparency where regulated or expected by governments or consumers. As a long-time leader in manufacturing innovation and operations design, Siemens supports how brands respond to change. Combined with lifecycle management techniques, digital twinning accelerates ‘on-point’ production, and ensures faster responsiveness.
Siemens’ Simcenter digital twin software relies on continual feedback supporting the testing and iteration of production lines, from supply chain logistics with partners at the source, to grocery retail or foodservice. Simulations in the digital twin help validate product prototyping with internal operations tests. The cost of failure is significantly less for a virtual prototype compared to a physical, in-market version. For example, UK-based TrakRap works with Siemens digital twinning software to reduce the costs of operations modifications such as packaging. The transparency of the application builds trust across the value chain.
New companies, such as Twinthread use digital twin applications to make it easier for small and medium-sized food companies to model their factory and in turn gain insights that optimize production. Utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning, Twinthread provides rapid value via operations cost savings, such as greater energy efficiency, and quality control.
Companies such as Twinthread and Siemens are supporting a revolution in food tech with the digital twin serving as the end-to-end applied tool in both the supply chain and for product management. Digital twins are timely in their ability to quickly respond to and improve product design, one day potentially anticipating pandemic impacts, or climate-, social-, trade- and geopolitical- related implications to food product development and innovation. Digital twins are design thinking in action, placing emphasis on consumer- and market-centric innovation ecosystems which remove the silos between demand signal and production response.
