Dear readers,

a lot has been said and written about the Corona pandemic, but rarely in connection with the bakery industry. It is affected in a variety of ways: preventive health care for employees, lack of employees due to corona, sometimes stagnant raw material supplies, logistics problems, weeks and months of the “out-of-home” sales channel being cut off and much more. Companies in the global baking industry have mastered these problems many times, but there have been and still are companies that have been brought to the edge of their viability by the crisis.

Your commments or suggestions are always appreciated: phone: +49 40 380 94 82 email: keil@foodmultimedia.de

The difficult part is yet to come, be cause the pandemic will not simply stop and everyone will return to normal practice. On the contrary, it will bring massive changes in willingness to consume and in consumption habits and no one can say today where this journey will go, which products from which raw materials, where, produced how and by whom will determine the market - that is all not decided yet. Nor do we know how the economic structures of the industry are changing. Where will people shop and consume in the future, how and where will they want to work? How do the products get to the customer? How will the ownership of bakery businesses develop? Can we expect a big wave of concentration? How will you define efficiency in the future, in dollars, yen and euros or in sustainability?

But one thing is certain, the industry is also facing a major technological change and the pandemic will accelerate it. Digitization and automation will find their way more and more. Machines will take over jobs for which we today still need people, and algorithms will control processes. Controls via algorithms only work perfectly, however, if the relationships between the parameters are clear, the influencing variables are recorded digitally at all and the systems are consistently networked and not only within individual islands. Because many relationships have not yet been clearly defined, there will be an upswing for industry-specific research.

Artificial intelligence will also find its way into companies in the bakery industry. But be careful, so far this is only a collective term for very different systems (neural networks, non-linear regression analyzes, evolution models) that work and learn differently. Their advantage is that they can also map complex relationships because they do not draw their conclusions from "understanding the relationships", but rather determine them statistically. An AI cannot or only poorly process unforeseen influences, e.g. because a sensor breaks or another unforeseen influence occurs.

The problems facing the baking industry worldwide are huge, but also the chances of generating more knowledge and more development opportunities. It will be an exciting future. However, I will not be there. After 40 years of journalistic work on and for the industry, I will retire and wish you, dear reader, courage, creativity and enjoyment of working in such an exciting industry.

Yours sincerely,

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