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Digitizing food supply chains In the following, we focus on a few innovative aspects related to data privacy, supply chain integrity, and data models for digital twins.
The global food supply network that provides us with our daily food is the world’s most extensive and most important critical infrastructure. This implies that we need to trust this infrastructure and its services. Unfortunately, we still see a substantial number of food safety incidents. In the fourth quarter of 2020 alone, the International Food Safety Authorities Network (INFOSAN), developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), was involved in 23 food safety events - about half of them in Europe (1). Unsafe food still has a substantial adverse effect on our health and economy (2): one out of ten persons is affected, and about 420,000 die each year because of unsafe food, with children under 5 carrying 40% of the foodborne disease burden, from which 125,000 die every year. Another threat to consumer trust is food fraud, referring to “the mislabeling, concealment, diversion, dilution, substitution/adulteration, unapproved enhancement, counterfeiting or grey market production/theft/diversion of foods” (3). Annual damages in Europe account for approximately EUR 8 to 12 billion. In 2019, cereal & bakery products appeared among the 10 top product categories in the annual report of the EU Food Fraud Network (4); the supply material category ’fats & oils‘ is leading these statistics and has seen an increase from 29 inquiries in 2018 to 44 in 2019.
A particular type of fraud, organic food fraud, which is driven by the profit from the high price tag of this kind of food, is on the rise. In 2018, the European Commission launched the OPSON VIII operation in collaboration with Europol (5); this operation led to 63 fraud inquiries and flagged 90,000 tons of organic products as suspicious, of which 16,000 tons have been downgraded to conventional food products by the authorities. One can also observe an increasing consumer interest in their food sources (6) and growing demand for individualized products and transparency in food supply chains. The benefit of more transparency is apparent as (7): + Consumers can make better-informed buying decisions + Traceability is improved, thus reducing the impact of recalls, accelerating the analysis of root causes, reducing fraud, and simplifying processes for audits and export control + Sustainability is improved by tracking resource consumption, CO 2 footprint and waste, by identifying critical process steps in the supply chain, and by eliminating them with appropriate measures Technologies enabling transparency in food supply chains include data acquisition technologies, Internet of Things (IoT), platforms for managing IoT generated data and big data technology (7). IoT is used to collect data from supply chain processes, these data are then stored, processed, and analyzed on an IoT platform like
D I G I T I Z I N G F O O D S U P P LY C H A I N S
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Why do we need more transparency in supply chains?
