Amanda Johnston, Innovation Manager at the National Centre of Excellence for Food Engineering makes a powerful case for Ai-driven systems to be widely adopted across the food and drink industry to improve productivity and sustainability. She shows that in South Yorkshire alone the industry contributes £434m GVA to the economy, employs around 9,000 people across 170 businesses and is growing 33% faster than other key manufacturing sectors in the region.
What she doesn’t say – because we tend to be quiet about these things – is that South Yorkshire is also leading the global Ai revolution in the Food and Drink industry. Drawing on a decade of deep domain knowledge in predictive asset management with the biggest players in the industry – from Muller and Mars to ADM and SKF – our Dinnington based @IntelliAM team are re-writing the play book for a £35 billion industry in the UK.
Our AI algorithms crunch massive data sets and turn them into powerful tools to unlock optimisation and predictive insights that are boosting productivity in an industry that employs close to half a million people in the UK. Our advanced manufacturing domain knowledge, harnessed to Ai and Machine Learning, is securing skilled jobs, saving energy, reducing waste and avoiding costly down time in an industry that accounts for close to 20% of the country’s manufacturing output.
And all this is happening in what was once the heart of the Yorkshire mining industry: in Dinnington, King Data is replacing King Coal as the power behind an industry that in Europe employs 4.6 million people, generates a turnover of €1.1 trillion and creates a whopping €229 bn in value added. Amanda says the “food sector stands at the cusp of an AI-driven revolution”. At IntelliAM the revolution is already well underway and industry is marching behind our banner.