FIREFIT: Saving time, money and reputation in the Food Industry.
Quality control of processed and packaged foods can be an expensive, wasteful process that involves removing product from the production line and destroying it during testing. Any sub-standard product not detected in this costly process then goes to market, potentially damaging the brand before being returned and destroyed at the expense of the supplier. Firefit will use its funding to develop a real-time production monitoring application that performs automatic quality assurance of the ham curing and packaging process. To achieve this, it will integrate sensors alongside multispectral imaging to identify any problems in the quality of ham or its containers. And a Scara robot at the end of the production line will sort finished products from defective ones automatically, according to inspection results in real-time. The use of FIWARE technology also makes it possible to reduce time-to-market through common data gathering and data processing. And big-data analysis helps identify potential problems, such as fungal contamination.