Fonterra Technology

The Project

As a global dairy nutrition co-operative, Fonterra is a world leader in dairy. It shares the goodness of dairy nutrition with the world through its brands, farming, processing and supply chain operations across four continents. Putting sustainability at the heart of everything it does, Fonterra cares for communities and contributes to health and wellbeing through the products and services it delivers.

Fonterra partnered with Beta Solutions to work with its in-house science team to design, build, and test a system to measure particular aspects of milk powder quality. 

The research and development carried out by Beta Solutions consisted of several areas of expertise: 

• Mechanical design. 
• Camera & lighting selection. 
• Software and image processing. 

All aspects of the project were inextricably linked and had to be considered carefully. ie: the mechanical design affected the lighting, which influenced the camera settings used, and in turn the overall image processing algorithms implemented. 

Various scenarios were researched, prototyped and matured to achieve consistent and repeatable milk powder quality results across the target range of Fonterra products. 

The project involved close collaboration with Fonterra science staff, with many site visits across the duration of the project to ensure the quality and reliability of developed systems.