Digital Solutions for Smart Food Supply Chain

Abstract

Food waste is a major problem in the current economy, equaling 20% of all food produced in the EU. The European Commission reported, in 2019, that the EU-27 generated 89 million tons of food waste, while the food service and hospitality sector accounts for 12.5 million tons of food waste (14% of total food waste). Catering and Food Services in Healthcare institutions face even more significant challenges: plate waste in healthcare facilities ranges between 6% - 65%; hospitalized patients continue to suffer from the risk of malnutrition resulting from inappropriate food distribution and consumption. In this paper we introduce ADCATER project, which proposes an advanced ICT platform based on innovative technologies integrated in a Smart Food Catering Supply Chain platform. ADCATER aims for economic efficiencies to farmers and suppliers; personalized nutrition accuracy to diners/kitchens, wholesalers, and caterers; also, verification of personal, organizational, and global nutritional policies. This will be achieved by harnessing IoT, computer vision and deep learning technologies to identify and decode images of prepared food "served to plate before a meal" and "left in plate after a meal", applying advanced analytics to derive valuable information such as served meal ingredients, the degree of adjustment and dietary gaps to the diner profile, batch traceability data, effective and up-to-date nutritional supervision, food waste, and correlation between consumer consumption and health.