Telefónica Tech digitalises Stolt Sea Farm’s aquaculture holdings with AI

Telefónica Tech’s Spain division plans to digitalise 14 of Stolt Sea Farm’s aquaculture holdings through its company Geprom and its Big Data and AI business line.

The five-year project will transform the land-based company’s farms in Spain, Portugal, France, Iceland and Norway.

According to Telefónica, plans include the development of a pioneering digital tool that will allow Stolt Sea Farm to optimise its business by giving it the capacity to predict the supply and demand of its fish.

The tool will integrate various industrial digitalisation platforms (WMS for warehouse management, MES for production digitalisation and APS for production and demand planning) with data collected at the plants and analysed with Big Data and AI.

Telefónica said its machine learning algorithms will also provide Stolt Sea Farm with patterns to improve its planning as advanced analytics will give it an estimate of customer orders and allow it to more efficiently manage the process of preparing fish for sale.

Stolt will also be able to optimise its processes to more accurately quantify the number of turbot – European flatfish, and sole fingerlings – newly hatched fish, it needs to bring into the farms to ensure it reaches the right size on time.

“The application of technologies such as Big Data and Artificial Intelligence allows the industrial sector to rely on analysed data to make better decisions aimed at transforming their business models and making them more efficient and competitive,” said Dario Cesena, CEO of Geprom, part of Telefónica Tech.

Jorge Juan Alfonso, food operations manager of Stolt Sea Farm, added: “The digitisation of both demand planning and our production processes, both in an integrated manner, will contribute to better service to our customers and better internal management of operational processes.”

By 2050, food production needs to increase by 60% to feed a world population of 9.3 billion. With climate change and its consequent impact on existing food production systems, there is a tremendous focus on the industry to meet the rising food security and nutritional demand.

According to the United Nations (UN), “the starting point must be the awareness that agricultural systems, which include non-food as well as food products, livestock, fisheries, and forestry, are the main source of food and income for most of the world’s poor and food-insecure people, around 75% of whom live in rural areas”.

“If we improve agricultural and food systems, we can improve the livelihoods and health of people, and produce healthier ecosystems as well,” the intergovernmental organisation added.