Fortifying the Future of Food: JBT’s 2024 Year-End Review and Future Outlook

As we wrap up 2024, JBT continues its mission to “Fortify the Future of Food” with a renewed commitment to innovation, sustainability, and customer-centricity. In this year-end review, Anders Lassing, President of JBT Protein, EMEA, reflects on the highlights of 2024 and shares his perspective on the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead in 2025.

New Purpose, Vision and Sales Approach

This year, we refined our Purpose and Vision to reflect better the evolving priorities of our customers and the food industry. ‘Fortify the Future of Food’ encapsulates our focus on sustainability, collaboration, and innovation. It’s not just a slogan; it’s a guiding principle woven into every part of our operations. We’ve taken deliberate steps to integrate this into our daily work. By aligning our vision with customer expectations, we’ve created a stronger foundation for mutual growth.

To better serve our customers we also transitioned our sales strategy from product-based to end-market focus. This shift allows our teams to bring specialized knowledge to every interaction, fostering deeper relationships and providing tailored solutions that drive value.

Accelerating growth in emerging markets

In 2024, the global landscape presented challenges, particular in traditional European markets, where inflation and energy prices pressured food producers. In contrast, emerging markets like the Middle East and North Africa have experienced tremendous growth, driven by a growing middle class and a push for self-sufficiency. Rapid investments in food production infrastructure have further accelerated development in these regions.

Our ability to adapt quickly to these shifting market dynamics has been crucial to our customers’ success and will continue to be a priority in 2025. By staying attuned to the needs of these emerging markets, we have been able to provide the necessary support and innovative solutions that help our customers thrive in a rapidly evolving environment.

Bringing innovations and new solutions

Innovation that directly benefits our customers remains a cornerstone of our strategy. We innovate to help customers grow their business, with the emphasis on achieving greater efficiencies and yield while at the same time growing productivity and profits.

This year, we made significant progress with the continued rollout of OmniBlu™, our IIoT-based predictive maintenance and optimization platform. With OmniBlu, our customers can now leverage real-time data to enhance efficiency, reduce downtime, and lower resource consumption, making their operations more streamlined and cost-effective. Focusing on using resources and energy in a well-thought-out way is becoming increasingly important for our customers. It is an area where we already have many solutions, both products and improvements. With OmniBlu, we can offer our customers additional opportunities to minimize consumption of electricity, gas, water, and chemicals for cleaning.

Our DSI™ waterjet portioners have had a record year in EMEA, thanks to the introduction of the innovative DSI812 portioner, designed for small to medium-sized producers. Poultry processors increasingly face challenges such as meeting exacting customer requirements, maximizing high-value product output, reducing food waste, and coping with a shortage of skilled personnel and high staff turnovers.

Automation, like our DSI812 portioner, addresses these issues by improving efficiency, consistency, and yield, while reducing dependency on manual labor. This has led to significant interest and adoption in the market, helping processors overcome their operational challenges.

In our freezing solutions, we launched the Frigoscandia ADVANTEC™ Narrow impingement freezer, which provides the same high capacity and performance but with a smaller footprint, effectively addressing space constraints for processors. Additionally, we improved the capacity and uptime capabilities of our bestselling Frigoscandia GYRoCOMPACT® 60 spiral freezer, ensuring even greater reliability and efficiency for our customers’ operations.

Continuing to meet our customer’s needs

At JBT, we strive to offer the broadest range of state-of-the-art equipment to meet all our customers’ needs. This year, we have seen increased interest in our expanded capacity range. For instance, our alco Spiral Oven ASH, which is perfect for small—to medium-sized producers, has proven a great complement to our Stein TwinDrum PRoYIELD™ Spiral Oven.

Another product that has become a bestseller is the alco Drum Breader ADB, which delivers a high-quality Home Style Breading appearance. During the year, we also introduced the NIA oil filter, an ingenious and sustainable vacuum-powered frying oil filter that extends oil life and quality, it can be used on all JBT fryers.

Sustainability is key

Sustainability is central to everything we do. Internally, we’ve worked on reducing energy consumption and waste in our facilities. For our customers, our focus has been on creating solutions that minimize environmental impact while enhancing profitability. Sustainability efforts also extend to the communities where we operate. From supporting educational initiatives in Scotland to collaborating with local sports organizations, we’ve embraced our role in driving positive social impact.

Entering 2025 with added strength

Despite a challenging environment, we’ve successfully navigated market uncertainties and maintained strong performance. Our adaptability and commitment to our Purpose have been key highlights.

Looking ahead to 2025, the potential merger with Marel is a particularly exciting development. This partnership will combine the strengths of two leading companies, allowing us to deliver even more comprehensive solutions to our customers. The potential benefits for our organization and customers are immense.

We are excited to start this new year with you and explore all the opportunities that our solutions, services and teams will bring to your business. We are here for you.

On behalf of the entire team at JBT, I wish you a joyous holiday season. We all look forward to our continued cooperation in the New Year.