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Connecting Machine Data Into Actionable Information for Food Safety

With a sweet spot in the proteins sector, Novolyze’s platform brings data from throughout manufacturing into one view to help improve efficiencies and sustainability.

A cloud-based solution, the Novolyze platform digitalizes food safety and quality programs by aggregating, normalizing, and centralizing data, and transforming it into actionable insights.
A cloud-based solution, the Novolyze platform digitalizes food safety and quality programs by aggregating, normalizing, and centralizing data, and transforming it into actionable insights.
Novolyze

When Novolyze was founded in 2012, the industry did not have a good option for validating low-moisture foods like cocoa or spices, so the company created and patented a surrogate bacteria that could be used in low-moisture environments. Since then, the company has gained more than a decade’s worth of experience validating hundreds of types of foods for many of the world’s largest food companies, primarily in Europe.

Novolyze relaunched about a year ago with new headquarters in the U.S. and a new platform of services. While validation studies continue, the company’s core platform now is around leveraging Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, and other technologies to digitalize food safety and quality processes.

Robert Wallace, NovolyzeRobert Wallace, NovolyzeNovolyzeThe company is working to solve the connectivity issue created by a predominance of legacy hardware in food and beverage manufacturing. “So many of the ovens, the systems, the dryers—the bits and pieces on the plant floor—they may have data they capture,” says Robert Wallace, vice president of product management. “But that hardware doesn’t necessarily talk to each other—it doesn’t talk to a mothership, it doesn’t talk to a dashboard, it doesn’t talk to anything. If you’re lucky, you can get reports off some of it. Some of those trends are changing, but there’s such a huge amount of legacy hardware out there.”

With a gateway connected to plant floor equipment and to servers, Novolyze can monitor more closely various control parameters. “You get access to a SaaS offering with a series of dashboards that feed from one or more plants into our dashboard so that you can begin to monitor that long tail,” Wallace explains. “You can see what’s going on within your plant operations—what’s working, what’s not working, how long it’s been running. We do a lot with statistical process control, other KPIs, etc., so that we can help you tune your process.”

This is not the sort of capability that many food and beverage producers have in their plants today, according to Wallace. “Typical for the last 20 years is the clipboard—what’s the temperature at 5 minutes, what’s the temperature at 10 minutes. You’re using your pen and paper to record the performance of the device,” he says. “That’s where we are today. If you were to look at the food manufacturing business in general, a good 60 to 80% of it is, frankly, in this pre-digital stage.”

Reams of data

“We’re helping companies deal with the labor shortages, but we also help them with efficiency and help them with reaching sustainability targets because a lot of these companies have zero emissions sustainability goals they’re trying to hit around water and power. So we’re taking all those paper manual processes and we’re making them digital,” notes Karim-Franck Khinouche, founder and CEO of Novolyze. “There is an unmet market opportunity to really get in there and help these companies—some of them with decades of experience in processes that are kind of still stuck in the 1980s.”

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