Artificial intelligence holds immense potential to streamline Danish food industry

Danish food companies must act now to adopt artificial intelligence, or risk falling behind their competitors.

This was clarified at the Danish Technological Institute’s conference AI and digitalisation in the food industry where, experts and players from the industry gathered and focused on new ways and opportunities for AI and digitalisation in the food industry.

“AI is one of the levers that will make our industry more efficient, and that you should not fall behind with,” said business director Lars Leopold Hinrichsen, Danish Technological Institute. “The field is moving fast, and if you want to avoid being overtaken, you must make sure that you are among the companies that are in the process of integrating AI into their business and processes,

In its strategic clarification explaining how to get off to a good start in practice, the Danish Technological Institute’s specialist in digital transformation, senior consultant Cathrine Lippert, offered several recommendations said: “It is about identifying how AI is best used to support the business. Initial strategic clarification is crucial to ensure that you don’t just put time and resources into a piece of technology just because it exists and seems important at first,” Cathrine Lippert advised.

She clarified that AI requires good data because AI systems are only as good as the data they are trained on. You must therefore ensure that you have both systems and processes in place to collect, store and analyse relevant data.

“AI will be central to the company’s development and operations, and it is therefore crucial to implement robust security measures to protect your systems from hacking, misuse, and misuse – and equally important to consider the ethical implications of AI use,” she added.

The participants also gained insight into the use of models and AI to optimise biological processes in the food industry from Morten Arendt Rasmussen, who is a professor of data science in food at UCPH Food. Among other things, he showed how AI models can be trained to, for example, develop plant-based cheese by comparing with relevant parameters in the composition of traditional cheese.

– If you don’t get a handle on your variations, you lose in the competition. The margins in the food sector are so small that in order to maintain the level of competition, it is absolutely critical that Denmark’s food companies manage to utilise data and digitalisation, eg via artificial intelligence or machine learning, to optimise their development processes, said Morten Arendt Rasmussen.

The conference is supported by the Danish Agency for Higher Education and Science and the Danish Pig Levy Fund and was held by the Danish Technological Institute in collaboration with Food & Bio Cluster Denmark and IDA Fødevareselskabet.

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