Real eye-opening experiences at the 2025 mineral water industry conference!
Intelligent detection technologies and smart solutions for greater line efficiency were presented to everyone who recently visited us here in Burgbrohl with the Technical Committee of the Association of German Mineral Water Springs (VDM) – and they were visibly impressed.
05 December 2025
Only a few people could see it with the naked eye. With smart cameras and classic image processing technologies, it became a little more visible. And the newly developed deep learning AI reliably identified the tiny foreign object of glass at the base of the bottle. The 150 participants in the well-drilling expert discussion on the afternoon of the first day of the event were able to experience this for themselves during their visit to our HEUFT SYSTEMTECHNIK GMBH in Burgbrohl. The insightful tests took place live before their very eyes. It was even possible to push the AI for optimized optical inspection to its limits by adding a few drops of water to the bottle – and to be amazed to find that glass-in-glass detection still works reliably even then: with pulsed X-ray, which only we at HEUFT can offer.
This was not the only interactive station where innovative technologies for greater quality, safety and efficiency in the filling process were vividly presented. During the tour of the 30,000 square meter production site of our globally operating family business, the visitors passed a total of eight of them, so that they could try out for themselves how easy and quick it is to teach new equipment variants to the module for seamless label inspection. The conveyor and line control systems of the future, a continuous track & trace system, and how well the best-before date verification works even when the coding quality is too low were also clearly presented.
With perfectly adhesive inks and printing inks developed by SIMACO GmbH in Burgbrohl in its own laboratory, this cannot happen. A tour of their recently expanded production facility was also on the agenda.
During the subsequent informal get-together at the HEUFT customer center, the participants of the mineral water industry conference were able to deepen their insights and discuss initial ideas for new joint projects for sustainable in-line quality assurance in mineral water bottling with our experts.
