Food manufacturing remains one of the least digitized industries, with many operations still relying on spreadsheets and manual entry, which are slow and error-prone, says Portuguese startup BRAINR. And even high-tech facilities do not necessarily have manufacturing execution systems (MES) enabling all parts of its operation to connect with each other.
The problem, says cofounder and CEO Paulo Gaspar, is that traditional MES systems were not designed with food production facilities in mind. And he should know, says Gaspar, because he had to build one from scratch.
“I was working at [Portuguese poultry processor] Grupo Lusiaves and around 2015, 2016, I led its digital transformation. I built the whole IT department from scratch and we slowly started transforming the whole thing, building a whole new ERP [enterprise resource planning] system for the group, because they had over 30 different systems, which was crazy to navigate.
“But we left the hardest part to the end, which was the factories, slaughterhouses and so on. It’s like every single equipment manufacturer has a mini-MES system to control its own machine, so you end up with a ton of software doing very specific things with no way to bring that all together.”
‘A digital brain for every food factory’
He added: “So I went to the market and said let’s find a good solution, and the reality was that there’s great [MES] software, but it’s not designed for the food industry. It’s why you hear all the time that some company went over budget in this huge project with some MES system and it didn’t work because they chose a generic solution and tried to adapt it to the specificities of the food industry.
“So we don’t look at those MES companies [such as Siemens and Rockwell Automation] as competitors per se. They excel in the car industry and other industries, but the food industry is a different beast. That’s why we built BRAINR from scratch.”
In 2023, BRAINR was spun out of Grupo Lusiaves, said Gaspar. “We built the entire thing from the beginning with that thought in mind; it was also a way for me to attract the best talent to the team. You could say Lusiaves should keep this for itself to get a competitive advantage, but I think there’s a lot more to be gained by sharing this with the world, and Lusiaves remains as a small shareholder.”
€11 m ($13m) seed round
Led by Gaspar (CEO), Rui Batista (COO), who has 20+ years of experience developing ERP systems, and Ricardo Granada (CTI), who has 25+ years in smart manufacturing software, BRAINR is a cloud-based MES system that can “plug and play” into software from leading food equipment manufacturers and connect to firms’ existing ERP systems (Sage, Oracle, SAP, Infor).
The aim is to “connect all areas of a factory in real time, guiding operators, reducing errors, and improving efficiency and traceability,” according to Gaspar, who was speaking to AgFunderNews after raising a €11 million ($13 million) seed round led by C2 Capital Partners.
BRAINR’s customers—which span poultry, beef, pork, and beer production in Portugal, Mozambique and Lithuania—are all at different stages of digitization, he said: “We have companies that mostly run on paper and Excel. But we have others who already have some digitization, but it’s all in silos, and they have no way to see the entire picture of the factory.
“For companies that are not digitized, we have helped bring all their processes and workflows into one coherent system with real time data. And for the companies that are [digitized], we act as the hub and connect everything they have into one platform.”
For firms with “dumb” production lines that don’t currently generate data, they can add sensors to generate data and then connect to BRAINR, he said. “Or we might just gather data from reading barcodes of what comes in and out of that production line.”
He added: “We don’t substitute the ERP, we augment it. So we might receive purchase orders from the ERP system, process them in BRAINR and give feedback in real time to the ERP, so that the company, for the first time, can have real time financial data. Are they losing money on a day-to-day basis? On which products?”
Virtual employees
AI is deployed in several ways, he said. “The biggest headache across all food industry verticals is planning, knowing what to do at any given time in which production line, with which people, with which raw materials, and many companies are still doing that with Excel. We use AI and machine learning to optimize that.
“Another example is the concept of virtual employees, where you can say, I want to create a virtual employee that at the end of every day, analyzes all production orders and sees if all the quality controls have been done properly, and if not, send me a report of what’s missing. Simple tasks like this can take people in factories hours every day.”
BRAINR also has integrated tools for reporting, managing, and monitoring food safety and compliance records such as HACCP and FSMA, and can be integrated into existing systems for food safety certifications such as SQF, BRC, and IFS, he said.
“Another issue is that more and more people who work in factories come from abroad, so we’ve translated the system into multiple languages using AI, including user generated content such as comments that exist in the system in real time.”
The next step is setting up AI systems that will prescribe tasks in real time and then follow up to make sure users know what to do, he said. “Let’s say go to location one and fetch this palette. If it’s not there, fetch the one from this location instead.”
Image credit: BRAINR
Digitizing one section of a factory at a time
Typically, BRAINR works with clients to digitize and connect one part of a factory at a time, he said. “In the past you’d see these projects fail miserably because it was a case of let’s change the entire thing, processes, workflows, people, and then on one magic ‘go live’ day, everything changes.
“Our implementation methodology is completely the opposite. We first divide the factory in sections, so for example the reception section in a slaughterhouse, the slaughter section, the cut-up section, the packaging section, the dispatch section, and implement BRAINR one section at a time.”
He added: “The feedback we’ve been getting has been so far fantastic. They have numbers in real time. One customer would only know how much it was selling once a week, and now it knows every second. That’s a massive difference, because now it can make better decisions.”
BRAINR’s system currently manages over 25% of Portugal’s meat production, with Campoaves and Avisabor (poultry processing) seeing a sharp reduction in shipping errors and Comave (poultry) achieving IFS certification in record time.
While the sweet spot for BRAINR’s tech might appear to be mid-size manufacturers that are a little behind the times, it’s just as relevant for top-tier CPG companies, claimed Gaspar.
“We’ve had meetings with some of the biggest ones in the US, and they told me, ‘We have nothing to manage the entire factory.’”
Dining and Cooking