Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Ocado trials fruit-picking robot

By Zoe KleinmanTechnology reporter, BBC News

Online grocer Ocado has shown off a soft robotic hand that can pick fruit and vegetables, without damaging them, in its warehouses.

The firm has an automated warehouse in Andover, Hampshire, where robots select crates containing specific items that make up customer orders.

They are currently brought over to a human team for selection but, in future, the hand could replace them.

Also in development is a humanoid maintenance robot called SecondHands.

It will work alongside a human colleague to maintain the warehouse.

Second Hands the robot maintenance technician — Image captionSecondHands, the robot maintenance technician, with its human colleague

The fruit and vegetable picker is part of a five-year research EU-funded collaboration between five European universities and Disney called Soma (Soft Manipulation), said Ocado spokesman Alexandru Voica.

The demonstration device is an early prototype, he said.

"People have tried suction cups, robot hands with three fingers... What we are trying to do is to actually mimic the human hand.

"The gripper is based on air pressure, which controls the movement of the robotic fingers.

"What we are trying to do is combine computer vision - being able to recognise products by looking at them - with the control aspect which is the gripping aspect."

At the moment, only the gripper is being demonstrated but ultimately the robot will learn to distinguish fruit ripeness through machine learning.

It will also be able to pick other items which require different care - such as wine bottles and detergent.

"Fruit and vegetables are the hardest to pick," said Mr Voica.

"When the customer gets their bag of bananas or tomatoes, if they see the product is damaged they don't care whether it's a human or a robot that's picked it."

Image captionThe robot warehouse contains crates containing various goods which the robots select

Prof Chris Melhuish, director of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, said that building robotic devices - or manipulators - to carry out multiple tasks is difficult.

"A general purpose manipulator is a really tough thing to build, and certainly understanding and exploiting the way the human hand functions, because it is so flexible and adaptive, makes a lot of sense," he told the BBC.

"There are lots of groups that are looking at robotic manipulation but often it is for a specific purpose - picking up a concrete block is not the same as doing artificial suturing for example - so the tendency has been to build different types of manipulators for different domains."

Chiquita Launches New California Banana Shipping Service

BY LINDSEY WOJCIK

Published: 9:05 AM January 30, 2017

Chiquita North America has launched its new banana shipping service and supply chain improvements to better serve its West Coast customers. The shipping service will reduce fruit transit time by half, resulting in 4-5 days from the banana production area to the Port of Hueneme-Los Angeles. This will result in better quality and fresher bananas for Chiquita’s Western customers, say company officials.

In addition, Chiquita has been engaged in a major refrigerated container renewal program. Since 2014, it has replaced 65 percent of its fleet to create a more sustainable shipping practices. Chiquita operates in excess of 15,000 refrigerated containers, which play a key role in the logistics of today’s banana supply chain. Improvements in the design and operating efficiency of containers has led to important environmental benefits including reduced electric power consumption, greenhouse friendly refrigerants, and use of insulation materials with reduced emissions footprint.

“All of us on the North America team are excited to deliver the freshest and highest quality Chiquita Bananas available to our customers,” says executive vice president of Chiquita Fresh North America Chris Dugan. “In addition to recent investment in our farms, this is another example of how we continue look for new ways to improve our freshness, our everyday quality and the satisfaction of our costumers."

The impact of this fleet renewal is substantial, giving Chiquita the opportunity to save up to 35 percent on energy compared to old units, and electricity savings of 34 million kilowatt hours and an annual emissions reductions of 17,000 tons of CO2 per year is possible—equivalent to taking over 3,000 cars off the road every year.

The true cost of shrimp

By Brototi Roy | 0

Quick read: 3 minutes

Shrimp: The trade from the Global South has hidden human and environmental impacts. NatalieMaynor under a Creative Commons Licence

Watching villagers standing waist deep in the brackish water of the Sundarbans – also home to crocodiles, Bengal tigers and poisonous snakes – armed with just hand nets is terrifying.

Dayapur is an island village located in the South 24 Parganas district of West Bengal, India. Residents catch shrimp seeds from the riverbeds, which they sell for starvation wages to nearby shrimp farm owners. From there, slave labour turns them into the cheap frozen shrimp which many people eat during the festive season.

‘Shrimp farming is making more money for the rich, who invest in the big shrimp ponds and processing industries,’ says Jagdish Chandra Mridha who has grown up catching shrimp seeds and works on the boats. ‘Poor people like us can’t even afford a boat and have to stand in water for hours. We are paid ten times less than what we were even five to six years ago.’ Mridha adds that this job is usually carried out by children, women and old people.

In the Sundarbans, the extremely disproportionate risks and returns of the shrimp industry became visible through the muddiest of all waters. Most shrimp from coastal countries in the Global South comes at prices which do not account for the hidden socio-ecological costs, ranging from destroying fragile ecosystems to promoting slave labor.

Value for whom?

The story of shrimp is a relatively recent one. Commercial shrimp aquaculture, primarily for exports, has been promoted across the Global South since the mid-1970s by governments and international institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, shrimp now has the second highest value in seafood trade , after salmon, and its production is projected to continue growing in the next decade.

In 2015, the US and the European Union were the two largest importers of shrimp. The lucrative profits in the form of foreign exchange are concentrated in the hands of a few, who are ruthless in cutting costs and creating legal loopholes. An investigative study by the Environmental Justice Foundation revealed how the rural poor and the environment bear the real brunt of commercial shrimp aquaculture.

In countries like India and Bangladesh, agricultural lands are converted into shrimp ponds, often forcibly. This renders them forever unfit for cropping, due to the high salinity. As the locals don’t eat shrimp, space for food production in the Global South is sacrificed for food production for the Global North. In most other cases, the mangrove forests upon which the poor also depend for their survival are destroyed to build shrimp ponds.

More than shrimp

Shrimp is just one part of the broader conflict between global free trade and environmental protection. This trend of neglecting the true value of commodities is known as Ecologically Unequal Exchange (EUE). To explain it simply this is the act of exporting goods from poorer countries to rich nations at prices which do not take into account local externalities such as ecosystem costs, depletion of natural resources or violation of human rights generated by these exports. As new insights show, EUE is an underlying source of most ecological distribution conflicts today.

Numerous cases of ecological distribution conflicts, stemming from resource exploitation in the Global South for the purpose of trade, such as disposal of e-waste, fossil fuel extraction and mining are mapped in the Environmental Justice Atlas.

Inequalities and injustices give rise to environmental justice movements by local people protecting their land and livelihoods. In Santa Rita, Brazil, a large shrimp company called PRJC has been severely harming the mangrove forests through its production practices. In 2007, the company broke a dike contaminating mangroves killing several species of marine animals. In 2011 it dumped 14 tons of virus infested shrimps into mangroves putting the entire ecosystem at risk. The fishermen and the local communities took collective action, launching campaigns and legal action. However, PRJC is still operational.

In South East Asian countries, especially Thailand, the situation is even grimmer. In 2014, after a six-month long investigation, the Guardian reported how slavery is connected to leading producers and traders of shrimp, including the top four global retailers: Walmart, Carrefour, Costco and Tesco. This was followed by another report in 2015 about the trafficking of Rohingya migrants who were sold as slave labour for the export-oriented seafood industry in Thailand, with shrimp as the most highly valued commodity. These enslaved workers are locked up under horrific conditions, including regular beatings, 20 hour shifts and execution style killing.

So, before reaching for frozen shrimp in your nearest supermarket, do give a thought to its journey from the coastal South and what it entails.

Starbucks unveiled a new third-party skill for Amazon Alexa this morning, letting regular customers reorder their favorite coffee and food by saying “Alexa, order my Starbucks” to a device powered by the online retail giant’s voice-enabled personal assistant.

Also this morning, Starbucks started a limited beta rollout of the previously announced MyStarbucks Barista chatbot ordering feature as part of the Starbucks app for iOS. It uses artificial intelligence to let customers order and pay via voice. Starbucks says the MyStarbucks Barista feature will be available only to 1,000 customers nationwide initially, before rolling out more broadly over the summer. An Android version is expected later this year.

Starbucks’ new Alexa skill was quietly rolled out a few weeks ago, according to the date in the Alexa Skills marketplace. It works via the Starbucks Mobile Order & Pay feature, which lets customers place and pay for an order in advance and pick it up at a nearby Starbucks store without waiting in line.

With the new Alexa skill, customers designate their “usual” Starbucks order in advance and can then place the order from one of the most recent 10 stores they’ve ordered from, using their voice with an Amazon Echo or other Alexa-enabled device.

It’s a notable partnership between the two Seattle-based retail and technology titans. Amazon and Starbucks are likely to cross paths more as Amazon launches new physical retail stores, and Starbucks goes increasingly digital. Separately, at the Starbucks headquarters complex south of downtown Seattle, Amazon has established a distribution center and is developing a mystery drive-up project, according to planning documents previously uncovered by GeekWire.

Gerri Martin-Flickinger, Starbucks’ CTO. (Starbucks photo)

On its earnings conference call last week, Starbucks said Mobile Order & Pay represented 7 percent of the company’s U.S. transactions in the most recent quarter, up 3 percentage points from the prior year. The feature has been so popular, the company said, that it’s clogging pick-up areas and forcing the company to consider revamping its new store designs.

“The Starbucks experience is built on the personal connection between our barista and customer, so everything we do in our digital ecosystem must reflect that sensibility,” said Gerri Martin-Flickinger, chief technology officer for Starbucks, in a news release this morning announcing the new voice technologies.

She continued, “Our team is focused on making sure that Starbucks voice ordering within our app is truly personal and equally important was finding the right partner in Amazon to test and learn from this new capability. These initial releases are easy to use providing a direct benefit to customers within their daily routine and we are confident that this is the right next step in creating convenient moments to complement our more immersive formats. We expect to learn a lot from these experiences and to evolve them over time.”

Solving the Challenges of Wasted Food and Food Poverty

Jan 31, 2017 | Global Urban Innovators, Perspectives |

By Niamh Kirwan, Marketing and Communications Manager, FoodCloud

Foodcloud – Iseult Ward and Aoibheann O’Brian © Foodcloud

Approximately 30 per cent of food produced for human consumption is wasted across the food supply chain, which equates to 1.3 billion tonnes of food annually. This includes 45 per cent of all fruit and vegetables and 20 per cent of all meat.

This inefficiency has enormous economic, environmental and social consequences. Food loss and waste causes about $940 billion per year in economic losses. We use land the size of China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan combined – 250 cubic kilometres – of water and a whole range of other scarce resources to grow food that is never eaten. If food waste were a country, it would rank as the third highest national emitter of greenhouse gases after the US and China.

At the same time, 795 million people around the world suffer from severe hunger and malnutrition. With rising populations, wasting food is is a core challenge of for food security. The UN stated that if global food waste was reduced by just 25% we would have enough food to feed all of those who are malnourished.

While wasting food is a global problem, it manifests itself in different ways. In developing countries, there are higher levels of unintentional food loss, often as a result of poor equipment, transportation and infrastructure. In wealthy countries, waste happens at the consumer and producer level.

Reducing Food Waste is a Global Priority

There have been a series of positive developments to combat the loss of food. Reducing waste across the entire food supply chain has been put forward as a high priority action by the UN and EU. Under Champions 12.3, a coalition of CEOs, government ministers, global institution executives and civil society leaders are increasing political and social momentum to achieve Target 12.3 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals which is to halve food waste and reduce food loss globally by 2030.

However, due to the complexity of the global food system, there will always be some inevitable food waste. Food redistribution by diverting surplus food that is perfectly fit for human consumption to charitable groups has been put forward as one of the best win-win solutions for reducing wasted food and feeding people. It is a business-friendly, environmentally-sensitive, socially-responsible alternative to wasting good food.

FoodCloud is a social enterprise that connects businesses with surplus food with charities that need it. To make this happen, FoodCloud has two solutions.

FoodCloud’s retail level solution enables supermarkets to redistribute surplus food directly to local charities, establishing meaningful relationships and ensure no edible food goes to waste. It is currently operational in the UK and Ireland. Using the platform, staff in a store can upload the details of their surplus food. A local charity linked to the store through the FoodCloud system then receive a text message to notify them of the availability of the surplus food. The charity then collects the food and redistributes it to people who need it.

Foodcloud – Iseult Ward and Aoibheann O’Brian © Foodcloud

On a bigger scale, FoodCloud Hubs rescues, stores and redistributes large volumes and a diverse range of surplus food from farms, manufacturers, and distributors, to the charities across Ireland in manageable quantities. There are currently three FoodCloud Hubs in Cork, Galway, and Dublin.

Working cohesively, FoodCloud and FoodCloud Hubs offer a solution for surplus food at every step of the supply chain. Working with an extensive network of partners across the food, retail and charity sectors, FoodCloud and FoodCloud Hubs have to date rescued and redistributed 3,880 tonnes of food, the equivalent of 8.5 million meals.

This food is redistributed to partner charities that provide critical services to youth, childcare, homelessness, addictions, domestic abuse, education and unemployment. Using food to support the work of charities has enabled the this sector to make significant cost savings, allowing them to redirect precious resources towards providing life-changing support to communities.

The impact our solution is having goes far beyond just nutrition. Our partner charities share stories with us: a women’s refuge filled with laughter as the women swap and share food and recipes; others sharing the joy of trying new foods for the first time; and a woman who gave her kids a packed lunch going to school and had dinner on the table ready when they came home for the first time in 6 months.

At FoodCloud, we have a vision where no good food should go to waste while people are hungry. Food wastage is a complex issue but there are opportunities to develop our work and further promote innovation in our urban food systems internationally, working towards tackling the problem on a global scale.

Diageo announced plans to build a US version of Dublin’s Guinness Open Gate Brewery in Baltimore County, Maryland. A rendering of the brewery is shown above. Courtesy of Diageo

Guinness

Guinness Is Bringing Brewing Back To U.S. After 63-Year Drought

John Kell

12:10 PM Eastern

Guinness is planning to spend about $50 million to open a brewery in Maryland, bringing brewing capabilities back to the United States for the first time after decades away from the market.

The Irish beer's parent company Diageo (DEO, +0.32%) on Tuesday announced it would build a U.S. version of Dublin's Guinness Open Gate Brewery in Baltimore County, Maryland. Under the current plans Diageo unveiled, the facility would include a Guinness brewery, packaging and warehouse operations, and an innovation microbrewery at the company's existing site in Relay, Maryland. "The new brewery would be a home for new Guinness beers created for the US market, while the iconic Guinness Stouts will continue to be brewed at St. James’s Gate in Dublin, Ireland," Diageo said.

What that means is that while Diageo will continue to import Guinness Stouts from Ireland, Guinness Blonde and newer innovative beers that are intended for the U.S. beer drinker will be developed and produced locally in Maryland.

“Opening a Guinness brewery and visitor center in the US will enable us to collaborate with fellow brewers and interact with the vibrant community of beer drinkers,” said Diageo Beer Company USA President Tom Day.

Day also touted the popularity of beer tourism in the U.S. and that likely looks like a motivating factor. It is estimated that more than 10 million people tour craft breweries annually in the U.S., and brands like Guinness, while not craft, would be a big draw as well. Breweries and liquor distilleries have invested millions in making their facilities a tourist destination as a way to fuel interest in their brand and thus increase sales. The Guinness brewery will have a visitor experience that plays into that growing trend—as the Irish brand intends to provide tours, beer sampling in a taproom, and sell Guinness merchandise at a retail store.

The U.K.’s Biggest Craft Beer Brewery is Coming to the U.S.

And you can own a piece of it

The brewery's role in product experimentation is also notable. Day and other beer executives have long noted that American beer drinkers are more interested in tasting new styles and brand, as evident from the growing popularity of the craft beer movement and newer alcohol trends like hard sodas and ciders. With that in mind, it makes sense that Diageo and Guinness would want to invest in some U.S.-focused innovation stateside.

Diageo said that it estimates that the brewery will result in about 40 jobs in brewing, warehousing and other facility roles, while the visitor experience aspect of the project could generate an additional 30 jobs.

The investment in Guinness reflects the brand's importance within the broader Diageo Beer Company, which also includes ales like Smithwick's and Harp and flavored malt beverage brand Smirnoff Ice. Last week when Diageo reported sales for the first half of the fiscal year, it reported that in the U.S., Guinness sales grew 1%.

Monday, January 30, 2017

Implications of the Food Safety Modernization Act

Maintaining food quality doesn’t end at the processor’s dock. Food processors can do their part to ensure food safety during the transportation phase of the cold chain.

January 24, 2017

James Mitchell

Fresh, nutritious food options are available today in more places than ever before. And, food retailers are adapting their facilities to meet this consumer demand, with food processors following suit with fresh and convenient meal solutions. But, maintaining quality and food safety is a growing concern.

New food safety regulations

Preventing food loss and protecting customers from foodborne illnesses are critical concerns for food processors and their retail store customers. A single concern can negatively impact consumer perceptions, and in turn, affect a processor’s profits and reputation—a public health reality that prompted the passing of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) in 2011. FSMA marks the most significant food safety reform measure since the passing of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act in 1938. It will have a dramatic impact on food processing manufacturers and producers nationwide.

The aim of the regulation is to better protect U.S. public health by strengthening the food safety system. This law enables the FDA to focus on preventing food safety problems, rather than relying primarily on reactive processes after problems occur.

Implications of FSMA

With FSMA, there is an increased responsibility on collecting and utilizing data, especially product temperature, to ensure that food remains fresh and safe from the farm to the manufacturer to the store to the consumer. Record keeping is a key component for FDA compliance, which means supply chain partners will need to ensure accurate, efficient documentation to verify the integrity of their foods.

As the regulations address the entire supply chain, not all provisions of this legislation apply to food processors. But, they should review the law and its provisions to understand the specific responsibilities and accountabilities placed on supply chain participants for actions and validation of processes. Food processors will need to work collaboratively with their suppliers, transportation carriers and retailers to ensure that all are aware of what’s needed for food safety compliance.

Consistency throughout the cold chain

Currently, a significant amount of data is being collected throughout the cold chain process – in harvest, processing, transportation, distribution and at the retailer – but, that data may be sitting separately at each point and not following the food to the next step; the data is captured but not shared.
This process has traditionally been fragmented, but connected solutions enable holistic insights and end-to-end food quality. By moving the data collected at each point into a cloud-based system, it can continue to be captured, stored and analyzed throughout the cold chain process, providing improved insights for more effective operations and informed food quality reporting.

Because of complex questions about data ownership and historic management of this data within specific applications, the insights and benefits to be gained from this data remain largely unrealized. However, it’s not difficult to envision in the not-too-distant future where processors and others can take advantage of a fully connected cold chain solution. That could include utilizing temperatures and other data to validate food safety and potentially creating competitive advantages by authenticating a fresh foods and processing story.

Best practices for safe food transportation

Maintaining food quality doesn’t end at the processor’s dock. Food processors can do their part to ensure food safety during the transportation phase of the cold chain. The following five temperature monitoring best practices can be leveraged throughout the transport of fresh foods to help create an effective program with FSMA in mind:

Establish pre-cooling processes. Before food is transported, it should be pre-cooled by the processor to the correct transit temperatures, as this can have a direct impact on product quality, safety and shelf life. Pre-cooling should occur when the container is connected to the cold storage unit.
Ensure proper loading practices. Perishable products should be loaded in a manner that allows airflow through the transport container, making sure that it does not go above the “load” line. Also, the product packaging itself should promote airflow.
Develop and communicate proper transport temperatures. When the product is then shipped to distribution centers, it must remain within acceptable temperature ranges for the particular commodity (i.e., 56-62°F for bananas and 32-39°F for dairy).
Integrate temperature monitoring device and placement procedures. Place a digital temperature-monitoring device on the product to provide the most accurate product temperature data. Establish consistent placement locations in all trailers.
Check temperature data upon receipt at the distribution center. Once the shipment reaches the distribution center, quality assurance staff should check the temperature monitoring device’s data for any breaches. These devices provide historical information about what happened during transit, and can help identify any issues that may not be visible but could affect the future food quality and shelf life.

At this point, it would be the distribution center’s responsibility to continue product monitoring from their site to the store. While this segment of the cold chain is subject to similar food quality risks, independent monitoring devices are not always used to validate that product temperatures have been maintained. It’s recommended to use these devices along the process for a complete, continuous monitoring program.

Addressing food safety concerns

A good starting point for food processors is to fully understand the requirements of FSMA and key dynamics of the U.S. fresh foods landscape. Recognize and address the risks and vulnerabilities through an assessment of a processor’s internal systems and gain greater visibility into the supply chain.

As food processors work to achieve food safety standards and comply with FSMA, integrated controls and remote monitoring can assist with the management of facility systems to address potential food safety issues before products leave a processing facility.

Food: Value Network Issues