Hershey’s North Star is a Connected Enterprise

“Consumer tailwinds are pervasive, but they are especially focused in several key areas and pockets of growth, areas where we’ve seen the consumer continue to evolve, and that creates opportunity for us,” says Michele G. Buck, Chairman, President and CEO, at the CAGNY event. “We know that nearly half of consumers are snacking about three times a day and that even when finances are tough for these consumers, they say that they will splurge on food products.”  

And on the horizon are changing demographics with Gen Z and Millennials: These two groups in 2040 will consist of 69% of global spending, according to The Hershey Company.  

Large and small food companies are investing in predictive maintenance automation to extend equipment life and avoid unplanned downtime.Data courtesy of PMMI Business Intelligence

Improving data integrity and security concerns

In order to move data and capitalize on advanced data analytics, food companies are evaluating ways to improve data integrity and move actionable information to the right stakeholders. “Companies recognize that automation investments are foundational for future AI integration, predictive maintenance, and operational agility,” says Markus Guerster, Founder and CEO at MontBlancAI. MontBlanc AI provides a platform that leverages unsupervised learning of production processes without the need for time-consuming data labeling.  

Guerster believes conducting a comprehensive audit of data sources and formats across systems is the first step toward data standardization, along with establishing a unified data model. 

“Companies are collecting data and becoming data rich, but information poor in some cases,” says Silvia Gonzalez, Global Director of Software Business at Emerson. “So how do we ensure that companies understand the pain points?”

“Industry 4.0 has disrupted the Purdue model by merging OT and IT, enabling new use cases powered by modern technologies.” — Ben Corbett, InfluxData 

In PMMI’s Using Smart Technologies to Bridge the Gap brief, the top  solution for implementing smart manufacturing right now was to “aid maintenance and operations at 44% and second was automating through large language models (LLMs) at 38%.”  

Emerson Discrete Automation Group provides a productivity solution aimed at maintenance and operations, called Pro.Lean, which sits on top of the company’s Movicon platform. The productivity tool connects to a PLC or other device, and allows an operator to use a wizard tool to configure a dashboard for operators.  

Of course, return on investment (ROI) is always present with decision makers and large companies. “Large manufacturers are already getting ROI while small to medium-sized manufacturers are falling into the awareness stage, which makes sense,” says Denise Rice Hall, CEO of Peak Performance, Inc., at the HARTING automation event in February. “Larger manufacturers have a staff, their automation engineers and Industry 4.0 programs.”  

Changing Consumer Behavior

• 91% of global consumers have at least one snack per day
• 61% have two or more
• 62% prefer grazing on small snacks throughout the day instead of eating three big meals
• 71% of Millennials and Gen Z say they’d rather snack all day than stick to a rigid meal schedule 

 — Data courtesy of Mondelez 

In addition to predictive maintenance tools, innovation is coming to servos, motors and devices. During HARTING’s recent automation event in February, Kelly Passineau, Product Manager Single-Pair Ethernet at Rockwell Automation, revealed the cost advantages of Single-Pair Ethernet (SPE) wiring designs for building control cabinets. During a group discussion, Passineau described a soon-to-be-released gateway device product—coming in 2025—that includes a flat media cable with SPE inside to reduce cabinet wiring for motor controls. “We have this gateway, and it will be capable of attaching 40 devices to a network,” says Passineau. “This will create a network of flat media-connected devices inside a panel.”  

Since this wiring design approach avoids pushing input/output (I/O) data to a PLC, the product can accelerate troubleshooting. “This allows plant personnel to look directly at this device, much like operators look at a sensor, drive, or HMI, since it’s Ethernet,” says Passineau. “We know wiring produces errors, and there’s a lot of troubleshooting and maintenance with wires.” Passineau adds that the company will also introduce an SPE communication adapter this year. 

Fully realized Industry 4.0

Consumer preferences drive demand, as Hershey currently has nearly 4,000 stock-keeping units (SKUs). So, food producers with advanced automation teams are evaluating data storage options and moving away from traditional approaches to extend data.  

“Historians are inherently OT-focused, centered around plant management and operation, and not necessarily aligned with Industry 4.0 initiatives,” according to InfluxData’s Ben Corbett, Sales Engineer.  

InfluxData, based in San Francisco, offers a time series database platform to collect, store, and analyze all time series data at any scale. The open-stack platform allows for third-party integration to extend data. Moreover, its InfluxDB product can ensure data security from OT to IT business networks via customers building on top of the platform. Customers include Siemens, PTC, NVIDIA, and Honeywell. 

One example is Teréga and its use of the time-series InfluxDB product and a traditional cloud-native data historian called I-O Base. With these two components, Teréga built a custom solution called Indabox, which is a one-way data diode that guarantees one-way data transmission from the OT network to the cloud. This custom solution guarantees OT security by preventing inbound traffic, which many food producers are just starting to understand. 

“Industry 4.0 has disrupted the Purdue model by merging OT and IT, enabling new use cases powered by modern technologies,” says Corbett. “While some manufacturers try to extend their existing OT historians for Industry 4.0 applications—such as product quality control and consistency in food manufacturing—they often find these systems too rigid, proprietary, and closed.” 

Bigger ambitions  

As automation becomes more of a commodity in operations and data integrity matures, food executives set higher goals. Says Buck, “We want to leverage our scale in our manufacturing base, not just to drive productivity, but also to build resiliency and be able to adjust things like looking at formulations, and other things in packaging."