Comsol > Case Studies > The Sweet Side of Simulation Behind the Scenes at Nestlé

The Sweet Side of Simulation Behind the Scenes at Nestlé

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

Europe

Country

United Kingdom

Product

SOLIDWORKS
COMSOL Multiphysics

Tech Stack

Modeling and Simulation Tools
Fluid Flow Optimization
Mechanical Stress Analysis
Thermal Properties Analysis

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Productivity Improvements
Cost Savings
Customer Satisfaction

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
Functional Applications - Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES)

Applicable Industries

Food & Beverage

Applicable Functions

Product Research & Development
Quality Assurance

Use Cases

Predictive Quality Analytics
Machine Condition Monitoring
Process Control & Optimization

Services

Software Design & Engineering Services
System Integration

About The Customer

Nestlé is a global food and beverage leader, renowned for its wide range of products including chocolates, cereals, and wafers. The company operates a Product Technology Centre in York, UK, where engineers focus on the research and development of confectionery products. Nestlé is committed to delivering high-quality, safe, and nutritious products to its customers. The company employs advanced simulation tools to optimize its manufacturing processes, ensuring consistency, efficiency, and adherence to nutritional standards. Nestlé's dedication to innovation and quality makes it a trusted name in households worldwide.

Log in to view content

The Challenge

Ensuring the consistency and quality of chocolate bars, wafers, and cereals is a significant challenge for Nestlé. For chocolate bars, the flow rate and pressure of the chocolate exiting each nozzle must be consistent to ensure uniform weight and nutritional content. For wafers, uneven heating during baking can cause different moisture concentrations, affecting texture and potentially causing spontaneous snapping. For cereals, the high-temperature extruder must maintain consistent pressure and friction to cook the dough evenly, and the viscometer housing must withstand high pressure to ensure consistent dough quality.

Log in to view content

The Solution

Nestlé employs a combination of modeling and simulation tools to optimize its production processes. For chocolate bars, the company uses SOLIDWORKS for design and COMSOL Multiphysics for simulation to ensure uniform flow rate and pressure across all nozzle tips. This helps maintain consistent weight and nutritional content. For wafers, simulation is used to optimize the baking plate design by analyzing the flow of hot air and ensuring even temperature distribution. This reduces fuel consumption and improves wafer quality. For cereals, Nestlé uses simulation to design a viscometer housing that can withstand high pressure within the extruder, ensuring consistent dough quality and even cooking.

Log in to view content

Operational Impact

Simulation tools help Nestlé ensure the consistency and quality of its products, from chocolate bars to wafers and cereals.
The use of modeling and simulation allows for precise control over production parameters, leading to uniform product quality.
Simulation helps identify areas of improvement in the manufacturing process, such as optimizing flow rates, pressure, and temperature distribution.
By using simulation, Nestlé can validate its designs and ensure they meet real-world conditions, leading to safer and more reliable products.
The integration of simulation into the design process helps Nestlé continually improve efficiency and reduce resource consumption.

Log in to view content

Quantitative Benefit

Simulation helps reduce fuel consumption in the wafer baking process.
Optimized designs lead to cost savings by ensuring consistent product weight and reducing material waste.
Improved efficiency in the manufacturing process results in lower operational costs.

Log in to view content

Case Study missing?

Start adding your own!

Register with your work email and create a new case study profile for your business.

Add New Record

Related Case Studies.

Coca Cola Swaziland Conco Case Study

Coco Cola Swaziland, South Africa would like to find a solution that would enable the following results: - Reduce energy consumption by 20% in one year. - Formulate a series of strategic initiatives that would enlist the commitment of corporate management and create employee awareness while helping meet departmental targets and investing in tools that assist with energy management. - Formulate a series of tactical initiatives that would optimize energy usage on the shop floor. These would include charging forklifts and running cold rooms only during off-peak periods, running the dust extractors only during working hours and basing lights and air-conditioning on someone’s presence. - Increase visibility into the factory and other processes. - Enable limited, non-intrusive control functions for certain processes.

Temperature Monitoring for Restaurant Food Storage

When it came to implementing a solution, Mr. Nesbitt had an idea of what functionality that he wanted. Although not mandated by Health Canada, Mr. Nesbitt wanted to ensure quality control issues met the highest possible standards as part of his commitment to top-of-class food services. This wish list included an easy-to use temperature-monitoring system that could provide a visible display of the temperatures of all of his refrigerators and freezers, including historical information so that he could review the performance of his equipment. It also had to provide alert notification (but email alerts and SMS text message alerts) to alert key staff in the event that a cooling system was exceeding pre-set warning limits.

Coca-Cola Refreshments, U.S.

Coca-Cola Refreshments owns and manages Coca-Cola branded refrigerators in retail establishments. Legacy systems were used to locate equipment information by logging onto multiple servers which took up to 8 hours to update information on 30-40 units. The company had no overall visibility into equipment status or maintenance history.

The Kellogg Company

Kellogg keeps a close eye on its trade spend, analyzing large volumes of data and running complex simulations to predict which promotional activities will be the most effective. Kellogg needed to decrease the trade spend but its traditional relational database on premises could not keep up with the pace of demand.

HEINEKEN Uses the Cloud to Reach 10.5 Million Consumers

For 2012 campaign, the Bond promotion, it planned to launch the campaign at the same time everywhere on the planet. That created unprecedented challenges for HEINEKEN—nowhere more so than in its technology operation. The primary digital content for the campaign was a 100-megabyte movie that had to play flawlessly for millions of viewers worldwide. After all, Bond never fails. No one was going to tolerate a technology failure that might bruise his brand.Previously, HEINEKEN had supported digital media at its outsourced datacenter. But that datacenter lacked the computing resources HEINEKEN needed, and building them—especially to support peak traffic that would total millions of simultaneous hits—would have been both time-consuming and expensive. Nor would it have provided the geographic reach that HEINEKEN needed to minimize latency worldwide.

Energy Management System at Sugar Industry

The company wanted to use the information from the system to claim under the renewable energy certificate scheme. The benefit to the company under the renewable energy certificates is Rs 75 million a year. To enable the above, an end-to-end solution for load monitoring, consumption monitoring, online data monitoring, automatic meter data acquisition which can be exported to SAP and other applications is required.

Coca Cola Swaziland Conco Case Study

Coco Cola Swaziland, South Africa would like to find a solution that would enable the following results: - Reduce energy consumption by 20% in one year. - Formulate a series of strategic initiatives that would enlist the commitment of corporate management and create employee awareness while helping meet departmental targets and investing in tools that assist with energy management. - Formulate a series of tactical initiatives that would optimize energy usage on the shop floor. These would include charging forklifts and running cold rooms only during off-peak periods, running the dust extractors only during working hours and basing lights and air-conditioning on someone’s presence. - Increase visibility into the factory and other processes. - Enable limited, non-intrusive control functions for certain processes.

Temperature Monitoring for Restaurant Food Storage

When it came to implementing a solution, Mr. Nesbitt had an idea of what functionality that he wanted. Although not mandated by Health Canada, Mr. Nesbitt wanted to ensure quality control issues met the highest possible standards as part of his commitment to top-of-class food services. This wish list included an easy-to use temperature-monitoring system that could provide a visible display of the temperatures of all of his refrigerators and freezers, including historical information so that he could review the performance of his equipment. It also had to provide alert notification (but email alerts and SMS text message alerts) to alert key staff in the event that a cooling system was exceeding pre-set warning limits.

Coca-Cola Refreshments, U.S.

Coca-Cola Refreshments owns and manages Coca-Cola branded refrigerators in retail establishments. Legacy systems were used to locate equipment information by logging onto multiple servers which took up to 8 hours to update information on 30-40 units. The company had no overall visibility into equipment status or maintenance history.

The Kellogg Company

Kellogg keeps a close eye on its trade spend, analyzing large volumes of data and running complex simulations to predict which promotional activities will be the most effective. Kellogg needed to decrease the trade spend but its traditional relational database on premises could not keep up with the pace of demand.

HEINEKEN Uses the Cloud to Reach 10.5 Million Consumers

For 2012 campaign, the Bond promotion, it planned to launch the campaign at the same time everywhere on the planet. That created unprecedented challenges for HEINEKEN—nowhere more so than in its technology operation. The primary digital content for the campaign was a 100-megabyte movie that had to play flawlessly for millions of viewers worldwide. After all, Bond never fails. No one was going to tolerate a technology failure that might bruise his brand.Previously, HEINEKEN had supported digital media at its outsourced datacenter. But that datacenter lacked the computing resources HEINEKEN needed, and building them—especially to support peak traffic that would total millions of simultaneous hits—would have been both time-consuming and expensive. Nor would it have provided the geographic reach that HEINEKEN needed to minimize latency worldwide.

Energy Management System at Sugar Industry

The company wanted to use the information from the system to claim under the renewable energy certificate scheme. The benefit to the company under the renewable energy certificates is Rs 75 million a year. To enable the above, an end-to-end solution for load monitoring, consumption monitoring, online data monitoring, automatic meter data acquisition which can be exported to SAP and other applications is required.

Coca Cola Swaziland Conco Case Study

Coco Cola Swaziland, South Africa would like to find a solution that would enable the following results: - Reduce energy consumption by 20% in one year. - Formulate a series of strategic initiatives that would enlist the commitment of corporate management and create employee awareness while helping meet departmental targets and investing in tools that assist with energy management. - Formulate a series of tactical initiatives that would optimize energy usage on the shop floor. These would include charging forklifts and running cold rooms only during off-peak periods, running the dust extractors only during working hours and basing lights and air-conditioning on someone’s presence. - Increase visibility into the factory and other processes. - Enable limited, non-intrusive control functions for certain processes.

Temperature Monitoring for Restaurant Food Storage

When it came to implementing a solution, Mr. Nesbitt had an idea of what functionality that he wanted. Although not mandated by Health Canada, Mr. Nesbitt wanted to ensure quality control issues met the highest possible standards as part of his commitment to top-of-class food services. This wish list included an easy-to use temperature-monitoring system that could provide a visible display of the temperatures of all of his refrigerators and freezers, including historical information so that he could review the performance of his equipment. It also had to provide alert notification (but email alerts and SMS text message alerts) to alert key staff in the event that a cooling system was exceeding pre-set warning limits.

Coca-Cola Refreshments, U.S.

Coca-Cola Refreshments owns and manages Coca-Cola branded refrigerators in retail establishments. Legacy systems were used to locate equipment information by logging onto multiple servers which took up to 8 hours to update information on 30-40 units. The company had no overall visibility into equipment status or maintenance history.

© 2015-2025 Asia Growth Partners Limited | Privacy Policy

Contact us

Let's talk!

Thank you for your message!
We will contact you soon.