Access to food is a basic human right, vital for good health and reduction of the risk of diseases. Eating many different foods helps maintain a healthy and interesting diet which, giving the body a range of different nutrients. According to the health and wellness brand,Easy Will Power, if we don't get enough of the right nutrients, our metabolic processes suffer and our health declines and if we get too much of them, we risk being overweight and at risk of conditions such as diabetes and heart disease.
But how often do you wonder where your next meal is coming from, who's growing it, and whether it's actually good for you?
We’ve all experienced it – all of a sudden there is a much-publicizedrecall on a food product, and we are checking our cupboards and refrigerators for those items. How does this happen in this day and age of food inspections and regulations? The truth is, most suppliers (and regulators) cannot effectively track the origins of compromised foods and make isolated recalls.
And this is where IoT and Big Data analytics come in. As much as they have disrupted other industries for the good – healthcare,supply chain,smart homesand cities, manufacturing – they hold great promise in the food industry too.
Up until now, the food industry has used IoT, in the form of barcodes and occasionally RFID tags, to trace shipments of products from points of origin to destination. This has allowed food retailers to ensure that they get their ordered products to satisfy consumer demand.
Recently, new uses for IoT emerged – more sophisticated sensors that can provide additional data about globally-transported food products. They can measure such things as dust and dirt particles. They can report on temperature and other environmental conditions that may impact their safety. If frozen chicken is being shipped from China to the U.S., for example, it would be critical to know if temperatures of those product environments went above freezing, jeopardizing their safety.
Multi-sensor devices, such as those being implemented by theEU MUSE-Tech project, will provide data in real-time, as foods are being processed (e.g. cooking temperatures), ensuring that proper conditions are maintained, based on food safety guidelines.
It is often difficult for human investigators to track contaminated food after that contamination has been discovered, because they do not always know all of the touchpoints in transport and/or processing. IoT technology, and its tracking and monitoring capabilities, can help investigations, as they attempt to identify at what points in a supply chain a contamination could have occurred.
Adding Big Data to All of This
Here is what IoT has added as a side benefit – lots of data and information that is out there in cyberspace.
And when all of that data can be captured and analyzed, it can record failure points, patterns in food safety issues, and even predict food spoilage conditions, based on those patterns.
Consider, for example, the benefits to growers of agricultural products when potential natural disasters can be predicted, based upon environmental and weather patterns. This is the work of companies likeDisaster Aware, using big data gathered through the patterns that history provides. For example, there might be certain environmental conditions that make it beneficial for certain pests or fungi to thrive – threats to growth or to the safety of the harvested crops for human consumption.
Big data can be used todetect correlations between DNA and RNA of bacteriathat appear in foods, and this can result in genetic indexing within specific foods. This will allow food inspectors to identify potentially harmful bacteria and the use IoT to track and identify the source. From there, additional data can provide environmental conditions that were the cause of the bacterial growth, allowing growers, processors, and transporters to prevent such circumstances.
Rats and other animals do carry diseases.
