British Sugar Optimises Supply of Sugar Beet with Analytics

British Sugar, the UK’s sole processor of the beet sugar crop, has just announced its new partnership with a leading satellite analytics company, Rezatec. The collaboration kicks-off British Sugar’s attempt to achieve far greater efficiency in their supply chain and processing factories, which provide the backbone for the company’s provision of field-level crop classification of sugar beet and other crops. 

The company intends to use the enhanced technological capabilities afforded by Rezatec to achieve better visibility across catchment areas where sugar beet is currently being planted by farmers. The systems will also allow British Sugar to accurately measure the acreage that their farmers successfully plant on, and they’ll be able to speed up the logistical side of harvesting with visualisations of which fields are closest to each respective factory using a distance-travelled metric. 

Nick Morris at British Sugar stated that “Rezatec was tasked with a preliminary piece of work to apply its crop classification techniques to validate fields growing sugar beet. We set the bar at 95% accuracy and we were very pleased that Rezatec was able to achieve 100% from the test data.”

In an effort to meet the initial working requirement’s of British Sugar, Rezatec plans to deploy its Supply Optimisation product, which is part of the company’s Harvest SAT solution. The system uses both optical and radar satellite imagery and applies its proprietary artificial intelligence approach to crop classification. This should allow Rezatec to identify sugar beet and a wide array of arable crops within catchment areas and measure the acreage organised into five-mile radial bands from four factory locations around the United Kingdom. 

Nick Morris at British Sugar, “Using Rezatec’s innovative Supply Optimisation product, we can achieve greater efficiencies in our supply chain by optimising sugar beet to closest factory locations thereby reducing costs associated with harvest, e.g. haulage.”

Tim Vallings, Chief Commercial Officer at Rezatec: “Working with British Sugar to help optimise their supply chain and factory operations is a perfect example of how the application of satellite data combined with advanced AI techniques can provide decision support tools that have a tangible payback to the business.”