Developing the “next big thing”

Sometimes, something unexpected happens overnight that radically changes a market. Other times, a solution takes much longer to be accepted or a solution designed for one application can unexpectedly resolve a completely different problem. Or sometimes, you find a dream customer with innovation in their soul and suddenly you have the potential to radically change a whole industry. According to Daniel Bieli, Head of Research and Development Die Casting at Bühler, to innovate you must be able to deal with the unexpected and have the ability to be flexible and quickly adapt. “We are living in an increasingly changing world, which means you can’t fall into the trap of doing things the way you did them yesterday. It means everyone from management down has to be agile and have the flexibility to suddenly shift what they are working on and adapt their targets,” he explains.

Bühler responded quickly. “We went to management and told them there was something big going on in the market,” Bieli explains. “This simply was not in our plan at all, so we had to shift resources, build up a brand new project team, hire external designers to produce thousands of drawings and run simulations each day, which meant it was an incredible achievement to be able to deliver a whole new scale of machines so quickly.” Within 18 months, Bühler had expanded its traditional 400 series Carat die-casting machines to include the Carat 560, the Carat 610, and the recently released Carat 840 and 920, capable of exerting pressure in excess of 9,000 tons when locking the two halves of the die cast together. These are massive machines. The smallest of the new range, the Carat 560, is the same weight as a Boeing 747–400. It made designing them even more of a challenge, as every part of the production process had to be simulated: Their size meant it was just not possible to build and test prototypes.

The type of market that you are in has a big influence on how you approach research and development. While the Advanced Materials business is being driven by a revolution in electromobility, the Consumer Foods business operates in much more traditional sectors such as coffee and chocolate manufacturing. Dominated by a handful of long-established and well-recognized businesses, it has in the past required Bühler to drive innovation. 

Yet Manuel Höhener, Head of Research and Development Chocolate and Coffee at Bühler, is noticing a change. “For quite a long time, we have been working within the boundaries of so-called traditional markets, with well-established products and iconic brands. Our customers have relied on our technological competencies and innovations to find answers to basic and key challenges such as capacity increase, process robustness, flexible process solutions, and more. In the past couple of years, the landscape has rapidly changed,” explains Höhener. “Mega trends such as healthy and ethical living, premium products, shopping reinvention, connectivity, and shifting market frontiers have generated new challenges, which require new developments and even radical innovation. Currently, the future is being shaped from both sides; by our customers and by us.”

Managing the speed of change is a delicate process in the more conservative food sector, especially when it has an impact on texture and flavor. This, in part, is because we as consumers are slow in changing our eating habits, with it often taking a generation for real change to come about. This creates tension when it comes to research and development. While there is no shortage of innovation spurred on by academic research and through startups generating radical change, adoption can be a much slower process. Reconciling these two worlds takes time. “We work with customers and start-ups who are interested in exploring new paths to increase their market share and are very interested in trying out new things. Both benefit from that push to be prepared for the next big thing,” explains Höhener.

Bühler not only works on R&D topics with customers and suppliers, but also with universities and start-ups to stay abreast of the latest developments, predict potential trends and, finally, identify how a bench approach could be realized at industrial scale. Two of the push factors driving innovation in the consumer food market are public health and sustainability. “Research includes ideas for usage of low-carb raw materials like chocolate with less sucrose or even without sucrose, chocolate without cocoa, vegan milk chocolate, upcycling byproducts from other processes and many more,” explains Höhener. Another potential area of investigation includes the development of solutions to optimize or even partly replace the traditional processing of coffee or cocoa beans to cut costs and CO₂ emissions. As an outcome of such initiatives, Bühler has built the first 85 percent CO₂-neutral coffee factory together with leading coffee processor Joh. Johansson in Norway, clearly setting a new standard.

With the market ready to change and the technology in place, Bühler needed that all-important client partnership to help drive a digital revolution. It was then that Whitworth Bros., one of the UK’s biggest milling firms with a long-standing commitment to technological development, stepped forward to become a test bed for many of Bühler’s R&D ideas. The result was the opening of the world’s most advanced mill earlier this year. This smart mill is fitted with 15,000 data points, generating information every few seconds on all aspects of the milling process. “When you see the data coming in it is like being in the Matrix and the challenge for us is narrowing down what we do with it next,” Nitsche says.