¡Hola desde Barcelona! Three days at Alimentaria FoodTech, a busy stand, and on Tuesday a walk up to the FoodTech Innovarena, where Julia and Anna collected the FoodTech Innova Award 2026 in the Sustainability & Circular Economy category. It is our first award for sustainability. And it went to something most factories have never been able to see: the product and water that leave a plant through the drain.
Nobody on a dairy or beverage line needs to be told there is a loss. Mass balance has said so for years. In September we put a number on what it adds up to: food that leaves a factory with its wastewater does not count towards the EU's 10% food-waste reduction target for manufacturers, so European food factories waste an estimated 13 to 42% more than the EU counts.
That makes the drain a circular economy question with an unusual shape. Every litre of milk or juice that reaches it has already spent its raw material, its water and its energy, and then it adds organic load to the wastewater. Keeping it in the process is the most direct form of circularity a liquid plant has: the product stays product.
Collo was one of four Innova winners this year. Alimentaria FoodTech describes the winning entry as "a platform based on artificial intelligence that monitors liquid processes in real time to reduce the waste of water, energy and product". On the line, that works like this.
Collo is a liquid process optimisation platform that finds and reduces production losses. The Collo RF Analyzer sits inline and reads the electromagnetic fingerprint of the liquid in real time. AI turns that fingerprint into process states, so a cleaning cycle or a changeover ends when the liquid says so, not when a timer fires. Moving production from time-based to state-based.
Collo Insights shows the loss, and Collo Signals stops it at source, through the automation the plant already runs.
Anna and Julia took the Speakers' Corner stage with "What a zero-loss plant looks like, and what it takes to run one", covering dairy and beverage between them. The session walked through what has to be measured, and what plants have recovered along the way.
Off stage, the stand rarely went quiet. Over three days we sat down with dairy and beverage producers from Spain, North Africa, Turkey and Latin America, and the conversations in between were often the best part.
One message came through again and again. Changeovers were common ground with nearly everyone we met: the product lost between batches is a loss every plant recognises. But Southern Europe leans heavily towards long-shelf-life products, and long shelf life means production running hot. Measuring inside those hotter lines is the conversation we’re taking home with us.
Barcelona brings us to four innovation awards for liquid process intelligence: the World Beverage Innovation Award at Drinktec 2025, the World Dairy Innovation Award at the Global Dairy Congress 2026, the DLG International FoodTec Award 2027 Gold Medal, and now the FoodTech Innova Award.
The first three recognised the technology. This one recognises what it does for the environment, and that closes a loop we care about. Every litre kept out of the drain is margin, water and CO₂ at once.
"An award is welcome. Measured litres are better," as our CEO Jani Puroranta put it in the award release.
¡Gracias, Barcelona! Thank you to the Alimentaria FoodTech jury, the Fira de Barcelona team, and everyone who stopped by. If we missed you in Barcelona, we will be at Anuga FoodTec in Cologne February 2027, Hall 05.1, stand D031.
Until then, the work carries on where it matters most: on the line, one changeover and one cleaning cycle at a time, to make every drop matter.
Planning a visit to Anuga FoodTec? Our team is glad to set up a meeting ahead of the show.