Column Pieter Vos: Oof, tricky!

When you hear ‘Smart Food Manufacturing’, do you immediately think of clever technical gadgets like robotic arms, cultivated meat, 3D food printing, and vertical farming? Or do you think ‘oof, tricky!’ Or rather of perfection and flawless production?

I regularly visit food production sites. What strikes me is that something is almost always the matter. A conveyor belt has stopped, a machine has jammed, or a process isn’t running smoothly ‘because it’s still in development’. Apparently, people assume that issues with the technical feasibility of innovations are simply part of the deal.
I see it differently.

Optimizing supply chains and production (lines) is of course nothing new. Motorola once developed Six Sigma, a method to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of a process. Fortunately, today anyone—including the food industry—can apply this quality management method. It focuses on minimizing process variation and defects through data analysis and statistical methods. The approach assumes that every task is a process. You then design those processes step by step, in such a smart way that nothing can go wrong. In statistics, sigma stands for standard deviation—the average difference from the average. The sigma level indicates how well (or poorly) a process performs. The higher the sigma value, the better. In short, sigma means something like: ‘a maximum of so many defective products per one million opportunities.’

Wait, really? Is that actually allowed? Of course not! Nothing should go wrong at all! I know that’s a huge challenge—especially with all these new gadgets and technologies. Still, I believe it’s possible. In fact, optimizing and producing flawlessly is quite simple.
Just keep doing the right things—and do those things right.

Pieter Vos
Consultancy & Interim Management