How to approach food processing issues with calm focus

Jun 02, 2023

Every food and beverage processing business needs to focus on specific issues, opportunities and challenges. One effective approach to do this is with a calm focus on priorities.

Retailers want to work with processors focused on how they can get the work done, as opposed to why they can’t.

Everyone has endured years of upheaval and challenges due to the pandemic, striving to get products made. Now, retailers want to work with processors focused on how they can get the work done, as opposed to why they can’t.

If you consider the retailers’ roller coaster ride, more of their time in the last few years was focused on the problems. Their supply chain teams weren’t celebrating the products on the shelves. Instead, they focused on the holes on the shelves and how to get inventory. In their merchandising teams, they weren’t complimented for prices that stayed the same. Rather, they were criticized for either negotiating too hard or gouging consumers with inflation.

Food and beverage processors had to find new ingredient sources, change packaging and deal with labour shortages.

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Video: Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Plant breeding has long been shaped by snapshots. A walk through a plot. A single set of notes. A yield check at the end of the season. But crops do not grow in moments. They change every day.

In this conversation, Gary Nijak of AerialPLOT explains how continuous crop modeling is changing the way breeders see, measure, and select plants by capturing growth, stress, and recovery across the entire season, not just at isolated points in time.

Nijak breaks down why point-in-time observations can miss critical performance signals, how repeated, season-long data collection removes the human bottleneck in breeding, and what becomes possible when every plot is treated as a living data set. He also explores how continuous modeling allows breeding programs to move beyond vague descriptors and toward measurable, repeatable insights that connect directly to on-farm outcomes.

This conversation explores:

• What continuous crop modeling is and how it works

• Why traditional field observations fall short over a full growing season

• How scale and repeated measurement change breeding decisions

• What “digital twins” of plots mean for selection and performance

• Why data, not hardware, is driving the next shift in breeding innovation As data-driven breeding moves from research into real-world programs, this discussion offers a clear look at how seeing the whole season is reshaping value for breeders, seed companies, and farmers, and why this may be only the beginning.