Miller Magazine Issue: 113 May 2019

34 NEWS MAY 2019 Bühler wins Queen’s Award for food safety and recycling innovation The Queen’s Award for Enterprise is the highest UK award for British businesses who have excelled in the fields of international trade, innovation, or sustainable development. This is the seventh Queen’s Award that has been won by Bühler UK since 1968. This year’s achievement is in recognition of Bühler’s development of a unique camera technology used in sorting machines, capable of recognizing the subtlest of color and shading contrasts in materials and foods and so significantly increasing detection rates for for- eign materials, potential choke hazards or contaminated foods. The technology is currently being used by food producers in Europe and the United States who are re- porting increased detection rates for foreign materials up from 85% to 95%. The UK-developed technology uses hyperspectral imaging to record vast amounts of wavelength data to generate highly accurate color and shading contrasts for specific products. This data is then statistically analyz- ed to create algorithms that inform the sorting camera exactly what color and shading contrasts to look for when detecting contamination or a foreign object in a production process. “The innovation here is our ability to gather such large amounts of data and then use that Bühler UK Ltd has won this year’s Queen’s Award for Enterprise: Innovation in recognition of its pioneering research into camera technology used in sort- ing 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. SORTEX E with PolyVision™ technology in use at STF’s recycling plant