In today's fast-paced world, the demand for high-quality, efficiently processed food products is greater than ever. Food processing and packaging machinery manufacturer, CFT, introduces its latest innovation to address these demands.
Digital Tomato is a performance monitoring and improvement package, which represents a significant leap forward in the food and beverage machinery industry, particularly in the processing of tomatoes. This initiative is designed to address the critical challenges faced by our customers while optimising efficiency and reducing energy consumption.
Understanding the challenges
The tomato processing industry is characterised by several inherent challenges. It is a highly energy-intensive sector with complex production processes that are concentrated over short periods. This seasonal nature of production necessitates reliable and efficient performance to maximise output and ensure the quality of high-value products like tomato paste, puree, diced, peeled, and sauce.
Our customers have expressed significant pain points, including the high costs associated with energy consumption and the need for dependable performance during peak production seasons. Addressing these issues is critical not only for reducing operational costs but also for maintaining competitiveness in a rapidly evolving market.
Digital Tomato: an end-to-end IoT solution
Digital Tomato is CFT's response to these challenges. It is an end-to-end Internet of Things (IoT) solution that integrates advanced hardware and software, expert support and tailored solutions to monitor, predict, and optimise the entire tomato processing line. This sophisticated system transforms traditional reactive maintenance models into predictive maintenance, ensuring that equipment operates at peak efficiency throughout the production cycle.
Your processing line will feature state-of-the-art edge devices and IoT technology, providing immediate access to key production metrics and equipment status via cloud-based dashboards on various devices, 24/7. All data are collected in a single management dashboard, offering a three-tiered view of operations: overall, line-specific and equipment-specific.
In this way, Digital Tomato turns raw data into actionable insights, offering weekly reports and feedback from technical experts to continuously improve performance. Customised analytics help identify areas for improvement, facilitating strategic decision-making and long-term operational efficiency.
The Five Pillars of Digital Tomato
Extraction Yield: Optimising extraction yield for maximum efficiency with potential gains of 0.5-2 per cent.
- Measures equipment performance (waste humidity and mass yield).
- Automatically adjusts process parameters to maximise performance.
- Monitors final product quality to maintain yield within allowable levels.
- Ensures stability of the incoming mass flow.
- Considers final product specifications (e.g., hot/cold break) for optimal processing.
Evaporators Balance for Energy Saving: Maximising efficiency through advanced thermal management.
- Dynamically balances water removal to maximise the use of high-efficiency MVR evaporators.
- Uses real-time data to optimise processing, reducing energy use during evaporation.
Minimise equipment downtime: Addressing emergency down time through a condition monitoring system (CSM).
- Improves visibility of critical parameters (temperature, vibrations, lubricant flow).
- Continuously records critical parameters, identifying the operating pattern of the monitored object and intercepting any critical deviations.
- Identifies potential failures or breakdowns, notifying the user of criticality in advance so that intervention can be planned with the least impact on production.
- Reduces the possibility of unplanned failures and production interruptions.
- Potential uptime increase of 0.5-3 per cent.
Final Brix Accuracy: Enhancing precision of Brix degree regulation.
- Precise Brix level adjustments lead to more efficient product processing and better match with customer specifications.
- Potential savings of 0.1-0.5 Brix on average.
Product Quality: Unified data collection and management system to correlate cause and effect (e.g., product temperature and hold time with colour).
- Improvement in product quality.
- Potential yield improvement (e.g., use of more green tomatoes when colour specs allow).
The Financial Impact
Adopting Digital Tomato can lead to significant financial benefits for our customers. The system's ability to minimize downtime and enhance yield translates into substantial revenue gains. For instance, the energy savings, increased extraction yield, and improved final product yield can collectively result in an average recurring savings of up to 500.000 euros per season for a single tomato processing line.
Note: These estimates are obtained under the following assumptions:
Season length: 75 days
Standard tomato line 4200 tons/day
Cost of downtime 60€/ton/day
Raw material cost 120 €/ton
Steam energy cost 45 €/ton
