Digitalization in food processing industry, save water, reduce energy consumption and combat climate change behind the partnership of Grundfos with Siemens. (video: Grundfos)

Danish Crown is a globally active food processing company. To fully leverage the benefits of digitalization and in particular prevent costly production downtimes, the company relies on close cooperation with Siemens and Grundfos, a specialist in pump and water technology.

Condition monitoring for food and beverage industry

Digitalization in food processing — **Connecting to the cloud has reduced the downtimes, simplified maintenance planning and execution, and enabled the reliable monitoring of motors, pumps and systems. (photo: Siemens)**

The project has involved the use of condition monitoring with subsequent data analysis, marking a first for the food and beverage industry. Key components of the solution include:

cloud-capable low-voltage motors
the open cloud platform MindSphere from Siemens
alongside pumps and sensors from Grundfos.

Linking the systems in operation at Danish Crown to the cloud has enabled simpler maintenance and lower servicing costs, ultimately resulting in improved productivity.

Partnership between Siemens and Grundfos: vertical market knowledge and specific expertise

The food processing group Danish Crown envisages enormous potential in digitalization, including scope to reduce costly production downtimes.
The partnership between Siemens and Grundfos is based on a solid foundation of vertical market knowledge and specific expertise.

Both companies are playing an instrumental role in driving forward digitalization with a stream of new solutions and portfolio elements. In this concrete application for the food and beverage pilot project at Danish Crown, Siemens is supplying the digitalization expertise with its Digital Enterprise portfolio including the IoT (Internet of Things) operating system MindSphere as well as control and management solutions. The pump solutions for the project are supplied by Grundfos.

Sidrive IQ Fleed and Simotics Connect 400, cloud link for optimized productivity

The low-voltage motors and also the pumps used at Danish Crown are equipped with:

Sidrive IQ Fleet
Simotics Connect 400.

Sidrive IQ Fleet an is a IoT digitalization offering for drive systems used for the analysis and utilization of drive data based on MindSphere.

Simotics Connect 400 is used to collate motor and pump-specific condition information for analysis in Sidrive IQ Fleet.

This enables connection to the open cloud-based IoT (Internet of Things) platform MindSphere and the Grundfos iSolution Cloud, ensuring comprehensive condition monitoring of the components used.

By enabling the early detection of potential faults, this reduces downtimes and simplifies the monitoring of motors, pumps and systems.

Packaging fresh meat for the retail sector

Danish Crown markets all of the popular kinds of packaged beef and pork, and the range of products covers everything from minced meat to roasts, sausages and prime steaks.

Sustainable meat production is a big responsibility and the Danish company constantly explore new possibilities.

At the farms and during slaughter and further processing, quality and sustainability are always in focus. They are determined to find better ways to produce food – with respect for livestock, people and the environment.

Meat is vacuum packed under controlled conditions in special food packaging using a mix of pure CO2 and O2.

The importance of water consumption in industrial food production
The water is a scarce resource, all abattoirs must be cleaned at least once every 24 hours. This demands a lot of water, and Danish Crown is constantly working to reduce the water consumption.
For example, they are taking part in the large DRIP project – Danish partnership for Resource and water efficient Industrial food Production.