Amalthea Uses Infor Integrated AI Solution to Help Improve Cheese Quality & Yields, Build Customer Loyalty and Boost Sustainability

Using Infor’s integrated artificial intelligence (AI) solution, Amalthea, a major international supplier of goat cheese and organic cow cheese, will be able to increase yields and quality of cheese, foster customer loyalty, and increase sustainability.

Amalthea anticipates saving over 500,000 euros for every 1% improvement in yields, which it may then reinvest in the company’s growth. In order to fulfil the increased demand for new cheese varieties and cutting-edge solutions like its CleardMilk formula, which allows it to extract whey, cream, and other components from raw milk, Amalthea wants to dramatically boost its manufacturing capacity in five years. This promotes sustainability behaviours and reduces waste.

Amalthea, a company with its headquarters in the Netherlands, works hard to maximise the use of the premium goat milk it purchases from the about 50 goat farmers who are members of the Amalthea Cooperative of Goat Farmers. The declared goal of Amalthea is to improve the lives of consumers, customers, and farmers by producing delicious and nutrient-dense dairy goods in a sustainable manner that takes full use of the richness of goat and cow milk.

The fact that milk content differs among farms and seasons presents one of the largest difficulties for dairy producers like Amalthea. In order to obtain consistent quality and yield across all milk batches, there isn’t a standard recipe that can be used. For Amalthea to optimise yield potential and ensure consumer loyalty, the cheese production process needs to be closely monitored and directed.

“Our customers require consistency in the cheese we produce”, “The big challenge is that milk is the raw material used to produce cheese and, by nature, is very unstable and inconsistent over the seasons. Infor Coleman AI helps us make cheese production as stable and predictable as possible, in terms of quality and yield, so that our customers are happy.”

Joris Aarts, chief financial officer at Amalthea

Amalthea used to determine the goal yield for each batch of cheese it produced based on actual or historical production data. Factory operators had to intervene and alter production when a batch of cheese diverged from the target yield or the proper target yield wasn’t set, in order to improve the process. In the past, production problems were found by weekly data analysis and manual data processing. It was not ideal to wait a week or even a month to acquire insights and make the necessary system changes to optimise yield with roughly 240,000 litres of milk processed each day.

“In the past, we had to do these milk yield calculations manually, and we were only able to do this once per week, or sometimes once per month, so it was too late”, “On top of that, we were not able to calculate the yields per batch. We could improve milk yield somewhat, but now with Infor Coleman AI, we can not only see the yields per cheese batch in real time, but it also gives us direct insight into what contributors are causing a higher or lower milk yield so the operators can directly act on it.”

Joris Aarts, chief financial officer at Amalthea

With the help of Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage and the Infor OS cloud technology platform, Amalthea was able to solve a pressing business issue involving milk output in 2020. Due to data silos, obsolete and disjointed systems, and a lack of time and resources, this was previously difficult to address. The upgrade served as the foundation for swiftly and effectively constructing AI-driven apps. Now completely automated from data collection and processing to presentation, Amalthea’s AI-driven yield deviation detection and explanation.

From milk delivery to the cheese warehouse, Amalthea uses Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage throughout its supply chain. It connects to and assists in automating factory production systems like weighing scales and processing tanks. Amalthea has reduced the time required for its financial closing procedure from weeks to days with the aid of Infor technology. Aarts claims that having the company fully operational in the cloud with Infor today creates a solid platform for future growth because data insights will become more and more crucial in the creation of dairy products.

“Infor has a process catalog specifically designed for dairy, and it can give us good insights into milk utilization and yields”,  “This utilization of milk is the most important way in which we can manage costs, so Infor already has helped us save money with that.

“Now, with Infor Coleman AI implemented”, “we can stretch that even further because we have more real-time data and information about this milk yield.”

Joris Aarts, chief financial officer at Amalthea