Towards a business and production engineering concept for individual beer brewing applying digitalization methodologies

Individualization is a common trend in many fields of production across the industries. Also in the food sector, significant changes can be observed. For many products, individual offerings towards the customer are meanwhile either mandatory or at least help to increase the sales and revenue. Somehow, individual product design and production contradicts scaling effects, which are especially important for food production. On the other hand, as digitalization is implemented in a fairly limited way in the food sector, currently great chances can be observed to build a unique selling proposition and consequently gain market share by implementing appropriate measures to enable a digital food factory. This is where the proposed idea comes into the game. The starting point is the idea to produce individually developed beer and ship it to the individual customer. The beer can be designed on a web page based on typical parameters, like beer type, bitterness, colour, or alcohol concentration. In an expert mode, individual beer creations may be thoughtful, allowing the creation of completely individual recipes (for sure, not guaranteeing the customer a perfect drinking experience). In any way, the data from the web page is directly fed to the brewing equipment in the brewing facility. There, using newly to be developed specialized machines, the individually ordered beer will be produced automatically. In this paper we discuss the individual challenges at each point in the production cycles and propose solutions to those.