Blendhub is sharing its secret recipes, the cost is to share yours.

Siemens Digital Industries Software has sponsored this post.

It’s easy to forget the technology that supports the food industry when you look at a meal on a plate. After all, a lot of food preparation is still done at home, or by a local restaurant. But what about the ingredients? They must come from somewhere and they need to be processed into a consistent, high-quality product usable by chefs, home cooks and fast-food operators. In truth, the amount of engineering behind the foods we eat is enormous.

Blendhub is well versed in the hidden complexity behind the food industry. The company aims to streamline food production into easy, repeatable processes to ensure a product has the same quality and consistency regardless of where it is made, who makes it and the local ingredients available.

“The founding principle,” as Henrik Stamm Kristensen, founder and chief moonshot officer at Blendhub, puts it, “was there are trillions of recipes available online from Google search to cookbook uploads and individual blogs, all together containing millions of different food ingredients. We set out to connect the dots and ‘kill the black box’ – read transparency – by identification of every single ingredient and its functionality in the final food product.”

To make this dream a reality, Blendhub couldn’t just worry about its own workflows, products and equipment; it also had to keep a close eye on suppliers from around the world. Even a simple ingredient, like milk, can have different qualities, material properties, compositions, allergens and tastes due to local regulations, animal feeds, climates, livestock and more.

Using Siemens Digital Industries Software’s Xcelerator portfolio of solutions for digital transformation, the company was able to digitally transform its own and other food producers’ product lifecycle, create a central, cloud-based repository of supplier data and scale it to the point where anyone could take a food product idea to market launch anywhere in less than 3 months’ lead time. And the best part is, Blendhub and Siemens are sharing this technology with the world.

Who is Blendhub?

At the end of the day, Blendhub offers hungry consumers, and food and drink companies, powder-based food ingredient solutions or powdered food products. Think of just-add-liquid meals like dry pancake batter: Add water, dairy or vegetable milk, eggs (if you’re feeling ambitious) and the powder to a bowl, then mix, cook and eat. Blendhub may have been the company contracted by a given brand to produce the powdered mix.

What really sets Blendhub apart from its competitors is its extreme flexibility and localization. Traditionally, a company might spend years and millions of dollars to open a new food facility. In fact, Stamm Kristensen laments the first time he opened a food production facility in Spain. “It was a turning point,” he says. “We did the same thing most other food producers do. We went out to the market, we looked for hardware, blending equipment, you know, all the equipment to build a facility. It took a little more than two years, and we understood that the final factory was not replicable … it does not make sense!”

After what Stamm Kristensen describes as, “all that hassle,” he called in his engineering team with a mission: build a blending and packaging factory that can fit in a 40 ft container. It must be easily transported, cleaned, recommissioned, validated, certified, switched to a new product and installed in any room with the right size to house it. With this equipment, Blendhub could now make its products where the customers and/or ingredients were located.

The next time Blendhub needed a new facility, all Stamm Kristensen and his team needed was to find a factory building for rent large enough to fit the container, a quality control lab and a food formulation and reformulation lab. The first facility of its kind opened in India in less than nine months and cut the cost of specific food recipes by 30%. Better yet, Blendhub now had a replication model to deploy anywhere on a narrow budget.

But to capture big name customers like Unilever and PepsiCo, who Stamm Kristensen says his facilities are approved by, this replication model needed to be taken a step further. It needed to ensure that wherever the facility was, its recipes and final products were consistent. After all, a globally branded food product is supposed to taste the same wherever you are, so the solutions created by Blendhub must be the same as well. To ensure this level of consistency, Blendhub needed exceptional and instant quality control and a digital transformation.

Blendhub’s digital transformation reimagines the food industry

Stamm Kristensen notes that the first step was to digitize the quality and production equipment as the hardware wasn’t cloud-based. Next, Blendhub created software to run and communicate with its equipment. The idea was to have the software control not only the recipe and ingredients, but also the operations of the equipment.

To ensure quality, Blendhub started using near-infrared spectroscopy to assess the quality of its products and the products of its suppliers. But due to insufficient software quality, they created their own ChemoMetric Brain platform. For example, a potential supplier might send Blendhub a sample of their whey powder. Blendhub can then run those samples through the spectroscopy machine both before and after mixing it into a product. They can then assess the homogeneity of the blend and how the finished product performs to see if it meets specification. By repeating this process, Blendhub started to produce a library of its ingredients, product compositions and performance based on spectroscopy data. These results now act like fingerprints to check anything that goes in or out of a facility.

Stamm Kristensen adds, “If we can digitize the suppliers that we have approved ourselves, and if we can digitize the outcome — the blended powder-based solutions that we supply to our customers — then what if we actually could digitize [any] formulation that is made by anyone in the world?”

This concept then became the crux of Blendhub’s food-as-a-service model.

Food-as-a-Service?

The idea of food-as-a-service, at least to Blendhub, is to enable different food formulators, ingredient suppliers and experts to participate in a project to digitize the whole powder blending lifecycle. Suppliers can input their own spectroscopy data and then others can assess their product’s quality. Participants can then customize recipes and compositions, based on all of this collected data, to create recipes and shared value.

For an example, Stamm Kristensen considered a retired food formulation expert with a wide range of industry knowledge. That expert is likely to still experiment with new recipes on their own as a hobby or a means to make money on the side. They can use Blendhub’s repository of data to customize their own recipes. The company could then offer this recipe, as a product, to a customer. Everyone down from the suppliers to the expert wins, as Blendhub ensures they receive a margin of the formulations’ profits.

“We can show that with these freelance formulators, with these ingredients suppliers, we are now creating a participation model where everyone [creating and participating are] taking advantage of that shared value,” says Stamm Kristensen. “So, this is … why we have turned our business model into a Food-as-a-Service model where we invite many other people and organizations to participate.”

Blendhub’s partnership with Siemens

To bring its digital transformation and food-as-a-service model to reality, Blendhub approached Siemens Digital Industries Software. Tools like Siemens Opcenter, for manufacturing operations management (MOM), and Totally Integrated Automation (TIA), for monitoring and controlling production in real time, were used to bring data from differing equipment into the Siemens ecosystem. But perhaps the most influential result from this partnership is how Blendhub is exploring the use of Teamcenter X, Siemens’ cloud-based Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution designed to provide organizations with a scalable, flexible and easy-to-deploy PLM platform to manage product data and processes throughout the entire product lifecycle, from design and development to manufacturing and maintenance.

Stamm Kristensen says, “This is where Blendhub and I came and said, ‘what if we can start using Teamcenter X and start utilizing some very useful capabilities for multiple users, companies and people to connect on one single platform?’” The idea is to use Teamcenter X as the backbone for Blendhub’s library and food-as-a-service platform vision. Its users can then access the data and produce a recipe on the database that anyone can use. As a result, everyone benefits by accessing the same single source of truth.

For years, Siemens has been connecting suppliers from all industries with OEMs via its Teamcenter software. Blendhub is a recent example of a small or medium business making full use of Siemens’ solutions in an effort to achieve sustainable success..

“Most companies are only thinking about their own problems internally, but we look beyond that and say, ‘how can we bring our internal solutions to the utilization of many of the other small and medium enterprises around the world?’” Stamm Kristensen says. “And that is exactly the same reason why with Siemens, we are pushing the boundaries to start prototyping what we could do with Teamcenter.”

Visit Siemens to learn more about how Siemens’ digital transformation technologies that can impact the food and beverage industries.