Published: July 17, 2025
Five Questions with Massimo Bizzi
Massimo Bizzi
CEO, Fortifi Food Processing Solutions
Where do you see today’s biggest opportunities for automation in food processing?
I see three areas in which automation can add immediate improvements for the food processing industry.
- Maximize adoption of robotic solutions to free the workforce from the physically strenuous and hazardous manual labor that dominates production and find opportunities to re-deploy skilled workers to other tasks that add more value to production.
- Apply vision solutions to help robotics become more autonomous and intelligent, Advanced vision systems replicate the ability of the human brain to recognize shapes and patterns also in case of inconsistent shapes and colors and is a very natural way to augment robotics.
- Use software to collect production data that support deeper insights, better decisions and greater profitability, to enhance decision making processes especially involving complex systems in multi-variable problems
What challenges do food processors face when they adopt new automation technologies?
As an investment in future productivity, automation typically pays for itself in a year or less, but the ROI is difficult to see in an industry that focuses on cost minimization. Especially in protein processing, companies view margins as too slim, and investments in technology often compete against conservative strategies of cash preservation or against projects that are required to simply keep the plants running. Food processing’s conservative approach historically relied on hiring more people to do more work; adoption of technology instead requires a paradigm shift and a deep level of confidence that technology will really work, as operations are particularly challenging in this environment.
How does automation help food processors meet evolving demands for efficiency, quality and throughput?
One of automation’s biggest advantages is its optimization of existing resources, including raw material, human capacity and production time. Automation makes tasks repeatable and predictable down to the smallest steps – and its output never wanes. Human workers start their shifts with great productivity and become less efficient as fatigue creeps in, but robots work tirelessly. They are built to be energetic and safety conscious, and they free the workforce for work that’s less repetitive, dangerous and monotonous. This helps a lot as well in terms of food safety. In an industry where employee turnover is much higher than average, the negative impact of low experience could be food safety issues and automation can greatly help to minimize these issues as well, as part of food quality improvement.
What role does customization play in successful automation strategies?
Standardization often looks like the ultimate source of profitability because it is easy to scale, deploy and maintain, but automation solutions succeed when they are unique to each customer. Ideally, we apply standardization where it solves truly predictable problems and use customization to tailor the solution so it addresses the specific customer’s unique process. We like to think about it as configured-to-order products as opposed to completely customized solutions. The combination of standardization and customization enables us to support each customer’s focus on quality control and efficiency and keep our solutions as cost effective as possible, to maximize the return of investment for customers. We help them automate what they already do rather than try to make them fit a preconceived notion of an automated solution.
Over the next five years, how will automation evolve in the food industry?
Change often arises as a response to three conditions. First, you feel dissatisfied with the impact of a current situation. Second, you can visualize the improvement you need. Third, and most importantly, you can see a path from your present to that future. The food processing industry is just beginning to reach that third condition and develop systematic responses to it. Automation will evolve in the food industry because of how much impact it can have, how it can eliminate a ceiling on output that many leaders have accepted as a consequence of the way the industry always has operated.
