Equipment in professional kitchens is increasingly digitalized and networked. However, future kitchens with smart systems which combine all segments of a gastronomical production of food are still not very common. This could change in the foreseeable future. Dieter Mailänder, mailänder marketing
“Smart” is a term that is just as many-faceted as flakey pastry. Some think of a small auto, others of Barack Obama, the youthful-spirited, communicative-dynamic, well-dressed ex-president of the US. The next ones remember reading about “Smart Cities” – digitalized cities in which the citizens and the administration only communicate electronically, and sensor-controlled systems inform about transportation, the environment, air pollution, and much more. Digital freaks live in such urban centers of course in smart homes, in which they control everything electronically – front doors, shutters, exterior and interior lighting, heating, kitchen and audio devices, robotic vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers.
The Smart Factory
The smart factory, a part of the so-called industry 4.0, also belongs to the mindscape of “smart”. Machines, systems, and robots are networked with each other in a form of industrial self-organization and programmed so that they control themselves, simply speaking, by way of complex systems (servers, networks, autonomous computing, real-time data processing, etc.). The Internet of things (IoT) and clouds are the basis for this. These systems not only produced in large batch sizes, but also in the so-called batch size of 1 (mass customization), therefore custom-built according to the special requests from customers. It is very demanding technically and economically to perform such tasks.
The Application to the Out-of-Home Market
Smart kitchens comparable to industry 4.0 are currently still not known even though innovators of our branch have developed digital solutions which can be referred to as smart. Greatly simplified, one can distinguish three phases.
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