Agristo’s ambitious growth strategy called for a more sustainable use of their resources. In their journey towards zero waste, they partnered with Polysense to improve their quality control with artificial intelligence. Our Virtual Quality Assistant transforms a labour intensive task into an automated, continuous, and real-time process thus reducing waste and saving time and money.
Agristo - world-leader in frozen French fries and a frontrunner on innovation
Agristo, based in the heart of West-Flanders, Belgium, is a family-owned company specialising in the production of potato-inspired frozen products. As a leading global player with multiple production sites internationally, Agristo serves over 540 private label customers across 130 countries. Their annual production exceeds a substantial 950,000 tons of finished products with an ambitious growth strategy for the future.
Offering a diverse range of over 100 deep-fried potato products, Agristo collaborates closely with clients to co-create customised offerings. The company prioritises three key pillars: delivering added value to clients, a supportive environment for employees, and investing in a sustainable future for the company.
Getting the most out of a single potato.
Agristo has ambitious plans for the future, focusing on growth while moving towards zero waste. A crucial element in this journey is the quality control team. As the key feedback point for the process operators, they ensure that every fry meets their strict quality demands.
However, the Quality Control process at Agristo, like most other food production companies, is manual, discrete and infrequent. Manual inspections are hard to standardise and require well-trained operators which are hard to find in the current war for talent. Small sample batches vastly reduce the reliability of the quality control process and the time intensity introduce large feedback loop times making it hard to accurately adjust it.
Time for change!
Polysense is our strategic partner that stretches us in taking our production to the next-level with long-term projects. Their balanced combination of knowledge, agility and skills make them our one-stop shop for AI and data in our production.
Introducing Agristo's Virtual Quality Assistant
The Virtual Quality Assistant transforms the manual inspections into an automated, continuous, and real-time process. Through smart sensing and the use of artificial intelligence, the quality operators are now empowered with an integrated and interactive dashboard that provides them with all the necessary information for accurate quality assessments.
The low-cost smart sensing module is designed for accuracy, scalability and robustness taking into account all food safety measures. This feeds data towards a series of intelligent algorithms that translate visual data into quality assessments. In this step, data-efficient artificial intelligence models are used, eliminating the need for intensive labelling efforts. These modules are specifically designed for handling the complex and high-throughput environment that Agristo is operating in. The assessments are fed to our application which is integrated with Agristo's ERP and MES environment.
That's how we can provide a smooth transition to this new workflow for the Quality Team.
Saving waste, time and money - three birds with one stone!
Since our Virtual Quality Assistant is capable of inspecting a very high throughput of french fries each hour, we can support the Quality Team with accurate quality statistics such as length, defects, colour, and shape while keeping track of anomalies and alarming the operators in unusual situations.
The application is strongly reducing the feedback loop time which is a crucial element in moving towards zero waste as this controls how much product has to be degraded or discarded. Furthermore, the Quality Team's inspection process is now much more efficient and fully standardised which improves the growth potential and reduces the onboarding time of new employees.
