One conveyor belt keeps 600 million ice creams moving

So when the company expanded production with three new lines this year, it also seized the chance to make that critical system smarter. Intelligent motor starters now monitor current, voltage and power in real time – laying the groundwork for predictive maintenance.

Private label producer Holiday Ice manufactures 600 million ice creams a year for customers in more than 20 countries. To meet growing demand, three new production lines have been integrated, increasing production capacity by at least 25 percent. At the same time, efficiency has improved while costs have remained manageable. The new lines have been operational since this summer.

In preparation for the production expansion, Holiday Ice renewed its freezing installation last year and adapted and extended the end-of-line system. This transport system moves products across multiple floors to the packaging machines, where they are packed in outer boxes, palletized and then stored in the freezer cell. Products from different lines converge on a single central conveyor - a crucial hub within the factory.

This central conveyor belt must keep running continuously: if it fails, the entire production comes to a standstill. The relocation of the freezing installation required the central control cabinet to be moved. This gave Holiday Ice the opportunity to also replace the outdated control system with a future-proof solution that enables further sustainable growth.

VSE Industrial Automation, a Siemens partner specializing in motion and control solutions, replaced the old central processing unit (CPU) of the end-of-line system with a new high-quality PLC and installed intelligent motor starters in the control cabinet. Standard motor starters are made smart via a plug-and-play link module and require no additional space in the cabinet.

"We were able to install them efficiently, without time-consuming cabling work," says Jan van Vuuren, Technical Manager at VSE. "Thanks to their logical design, they are also easy to maintain."

In addition to switching on and off, the motor starters continuously measure electricity, voltage and power, among other things. This provides insight into the behavior of the motors that drive the conveyor belts. "By visualizing this data, you can see how a motor is running, how often it stops and how many start-stops there are," says Ruud Dofferhoff, who helps manufacturers integrate smart motor technology at Siemens.

The data can be used in both the operational technology (OT) and IT environments. This supports the transition from reactive or periodic maintenance to predictive, data-driven maintenance. In addition, continuous monitoring of energy consumption enables targeted energy management - for example, to reduce peak loads.

Although Holiday Ice is not yet actively using the available data from the motor starters, managing director Roelof Knijn explicitly sees this as an investment in the future. "We already have a form of predictive maintenance, but we are not yet using an overarching system. We do want to prepare our installations for that. That is why we incorporate smart manufacturing functionality into all our investments. Continuity is our top priority. If we can use data from the motor starters for that purpose, it delivers additional value. If you hear or see a conveyor belt rattling, you are actually already too late. The priority right now is to get our new production lines running stably; further optimization will follow later."

August 2026