Imagine you are an Engineer working for a Food Company. Your brief is to design a machine to make a new product, one that has never been made before - Vienetta
The videos shows a Vienetta production line. What you do not see is the machine producing the product flowing onto the line. This machine would have to mix all the ingredients, heating and cooling them before finally forcing them through a nozzle onto the production line. The ice cream would have to be at the right consistency, temperature and viscosity or it may otherwise have just been a pool of liquid.
The machine was adapted from the plastic extrustion industry, since no such machine existed in ice cream manufacture. The mechanics and electrical controls of the machine would have to be adapted to the world of ice cream. The machine operation would need to be controlled by 'SOFTWARE' that was intelligent enough to handle all the variables involved. The software would need to be written in 'ASSEMBLER' as other operating systems would be too slow and unable to respond to the real time digital and analogue inputs needed to control all the processes involved.
Food technologists and scientists collaborated with the electrical, mechanical and software engineers to get everything working correctly to produce Vienetta.
The final product was unique and innovative at the time, and only made possible through the combined efforts of the engineers, food technologists and scientists. It provided a competitive advantage for Unilever as no other Company had the skill or expertise to make such a product. Tyhis was a new product not just based on the food science but also its method of manufacture.
This is the power of creative engineering, crossing functional boundaries to create new products and achieve competitive advantages for the Company.