Danish family-owned machine manufacturer Aasted Aps finds itself in good company among reputable confectionery machine manufacturers. SweetConnect is an initiative striving to unite the industry to establish an all-encompassing digital platform, accepted and used by confectionery producers and machine manufacturers alike.

“Only together, we can replace piecemeal approaches and work towards a unified solution that benefits all”, says Tim Hellwig, Managing Director of SweetConnect. A statement that Aasted Aps CEO Piet Hoffmann Tæstensen can only agree with, as many market-participants push their individual ideas into the market, leaving confectionery producers with fragmented systems that don't communicate or simply do not service the entire production process, which is often highly individualised and varies from producer to producer. “It has proven difficult and inefficient for standalone businesses to tackle the complexity a true solution requires alone”, Hoffmann points out.

 “A win-win scenario for machine builders and confectionery producers”, as Enrico Franz, Business Development Manager at SweetConnect puts it. “By joining, machine manufacturers gain valuable insights on the performance of their equipment, increase the quality of their customer service, and generate new business, upselling and aftermarket-sales opportunities. Confectionery producers, on the other hand, can significantly reduce downtimes by accelerating the procurement process of spare and wear parts, while lowering response times through access to best practices and knowledge, resulting in a smoothly running production.”

For SweetConnect, the new addition sends an important signal to the global confectionery industry and to all the remaining machine manufacturers who have yet to join. Collaboration is key to further growing the initiative. In the near future, the SweetConnect platform will support Aasted equipment natively. The exact timeline, however, has yet to be established.