Sustainable and Lifecycle Engineering – Industrial Hands-on Experience of Systems Engineering in the food and beverage industry

The food and beverage industry’s focus are consumable products for end customers. Therefore, the core of their intellectual property (IP) is a deep understanding of the ingredients which make-up those products and the processes those ingredients need to be processed. This includes also a deep understanding in machinery and plant engineering. To combine both perspectives, food and beverage products and the machines and plants, Systems Engineering (SE) can be a huge business lever.
SE covers all phases of the system lifecycle: This enables engineers to focus additional aspects, conditions or usages of the product or sub-elements of the product.

The considered company is a privately owned brewery. In the traditional beer brewing process produces several by-products such as e.g. spent grain. Often this spent grain is sold to local farmers as animal feed. As part of a product and process innovation project within this company an optional usage of the spent grain as food is envisaged. The considered company used SE to engineer, model and analyze the product and production system across all lifecycle phases to innovate a sustainable and lifecycle-oriented system. This paper will elaborate this company’s hands-on experience, elaborate the current state of SE and the way forward.