The S3FOOD project, in which the Galicia Food Cluster (Clusaga) participates together with other 12 European partners, has selected the 14 cross-sectoral collaborative digitalisation initiatives that will receive support in the scope of its second call for proposals.

A total of 140 proposals were received in this call, nine of which were submitted by Galician organisations and another that is a collaboration between Galicia and Asturias, thanks to the cooperation between Clusaga and the Meat Industry Association of Asturias (ASINCAR), both partners in the S3FOOD project.

This second S3FOOD call included three types of vouchers for projects: "exploration" –with a maximum support of 30,000 euros– "validation" –where up to 120,000 euros can be received– and "application" –where the amount of the grant reaches up to 180,000 euros.

The two Clusaga-supported collaborative projects that have been selected will promote the digitalisation and the advance towards Industry 4.0 in different sectors of the agri-food industry.

Dairy and wine, application sectors of the two selected projects

The project “Smart system for real-time monitoring of evaporation in wine aging” (LIBATIO), involves the Galician SMEs SC Robotics, NIGAL and Viña Costeira with the support of Clusaga, has been selected in the validation voucher category, and will receive a grant of up to120,000 euros.

This initiative is based on the development of a network of autonomous remote sensing devices coupled to wooden barrels, selected and properly distributed in the winery, which monitor in real time the key environmental parameters that affect the evaporation of the wine. This data will be processed using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to obtain correlations between variables and will be displayed on a website and mobile application.

Through these platforms, developed with machine learning and big data technologies, the winegrower will obtain information of great interest, allowing decision making and preventing production problems.

The other selected project has been “Cloud-assessment of dairy production performance”. This is a cross-sectoral collaboration initiative, between companies of Clusaga and ASINCAR, including Dulcegrado, AOTECH and the Galician SME Glaucor.

This project, which has been awarded an application voucher of up to 180,000 euros, consists of the development of a system to automate the collection of data in the process of dairy production, energy supply and quality control, which will then be analysed on an Internet of Things (IoT) platform.

Through this system and with the introduction of Near Infrared (NIR) technology, a characterisation of the production can be obtained, in terms of energy costs and performance, to optimize the use of ingredients and achieve savings in the use of these.