Bühler wins Queen’s Award for food safety and recycling innovation

Bühler UK Ltd has won the 2019 Queen’s Award for Enterprise: Innovation in recognition of its pioneering research into camera technology used in sorting machines.

The technological breakthrough is being used to drive up food safety controls in the nut and frozen vegetable sectors while also helping to increase plastic recycling rates.

This is Bühler’s seventh Queen’s Award since 1968, and this year’s achievement is in recognition of its development of a unique camera technology used in sorting machines, capable of recognising the subtlest colour and shading contrasts in materials and foods and so significantly increasing detection rates for foreign materials, potential choke hazards, or contaminated foods.

The technology is currently being used by food producers in Europe and the United States who are reporting increased detection rates for foreign materials up from 85 per cent to 95 per cent.

The UK-developed technology uses hyperspectral imaging to record vast amounts of wavelength data to generate highly accurate colour and shading contrasts to look for when detecting contamination or a foreign object in a production process.

This data is then statistically analysed to create algorithms that inform the sorting camera exactly what colour and shading contrasts to look for when detecting contamination of a foreign object in a production process.

Benedict Deefholts, Senior Research Engineer for Bühler, said: “The innovation here is our ability to gather such large amounts of data and then use that data to optimise a conventional narrow band digital camera so that it is capable of quickly and efficiently detecting very specific things, whether it is shells in nuts, foreign materials in a vegetable production line, or even different grades of polymers in a recycling plant.”