Intelligent Dough Mixer Project

"Our project brings together the data technologists at RedBlack Software, Britain's leading provider of software solutions to the commercial bakery sector, and the food scientists at Campden BRI, the UK's most prominent food and drink industry research association.

The project's aim is to exploit recent developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) in order to create an entirely automated system that accurately tests and predicts optimal dough quality and consistency for commercial bakers. Moreover, it will be capable of taking data from many sources and learning from it.

Bakeries are highly sophisticated manufacturing environments that use a complex mix of raw materials to produce a wide range of goods in a short time. Getting dough mixes right is critical to operational success but difficult to achieve. This is because of unpredictable reactions between biology (yeast), chemistry (enzyme reactions, oxidation/reduction) and physics (water movement) that takes place during the 3-12 minutes that it takes to mix dough.

Even slightly differing flour qualities have a big effect on the end product quality. Because of this, bakers throw away considerable amounts of dough before it is ever baked. We aim to minimise this wasteful practice and save commercial bakers man-hours and money with our AI dough quality predictor.

Britain has historically been a world-leader in bakery technology. In 1961, for example,

Campden BRI's forerunner the British Baking Industries Research Association invented the Chorleywood Bread Process. This was a new type of dough making now used all over the globe (in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and India it makes up 80% of bread production). This used high shear mixing processes to fully develop dough in around 3 minutes, with later developments in 1995 using pressure and vacuum control in mixing.

Similarly, RedBlack Software had always been at the cutting edge of computer technology with its Cybake family of bakery management software solutions. All the recent additions to

this range of applications take full advantage of the latest cloud, mobile and advances in data analytics technologies. Cybake solutions are popular with craft bakers all over the UK and Eire and we are making headway in mainland Europe and in the USA.

RedBlack Software and Campden BRI aim to build on this tradition of British innovation to create a brand new, unique product that will have a big impact on commercial bakers all over the world."