Real-Time Sensors Track Food as It Moves Through Supply Chain

By Suzanne Kattau

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The food ingredients of the average meal in the U.S. travels over 1,500 miles to get to a plate. RTInsights Editorial Director Suzanne Kattau discusses how real-time sensor technology helps shippers track that meal’s ingredients through each mile.

There are now real-time traceability and monitoring systems for agricultural products based on wireless sensor networks.GlobeRanger Corp. and Tech Mahindra Ltd. are twocompanies offering real-time, sensor-based systems for the food industry to track ingredients over many food miles.

What is a food mile? A food mile is defined as the distance food travels from where it is grown or raised to where it is ultimately purchased by the consumer or end user, according to The Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, a research and education center on the campus of Iowa State University. The food ingredients of the average meal in the U.S. travels over 1,500 miles to get to a plate according to “Food, Fuel, and Freeways: An Iowa perspective on how far food travels, fuel usage, and greenhouse gas emissions,” a report on a study conducted by Rich Pirog, Associate Director of the Leopold Center at the time.

What's more, the food industry can now “optimize across the agricultural value chain the information to drive great decisions on-the-ground and in real-time,” according to John Corbett, Ph.D., an agricultural climatologist and the cofounder and CEO of aWhere, Inc., a real-time Agricultural Intelligence (AI) software provider based in Broomfield, Colorado.

“We now have the capacity to create a real-time, localized, agricultural production tracking and monitoring system—a food/nutrient security information system,” wrote Corbett in a World Bank blog post on May 26, 2015. “What Big Data does to optimize our morning commutes in cities can also be done to monitor agriculture.”

GlobeRanger: Tracking Food in Real-Time

GlobeRanger Corp., a Fujitsu company and provider of sensor-based solutions, says they have created “an information processing infrastructure at the edge of the enterprise” which enables companies to harness data that is generated "outside traditional IT environments to improve their business processes and move closer to being real-time organizations.”

Founded in 1999, Texas-based GlobeRanger is helping to solve food-tracking problems within the food industry, in part, by monitoring real-time data about products, their environment and their movement. According to the company:

“Within the food industry, GlobeRanger solutions provide real-time track and trace capabilities to enable food companies to monitor the complete harvest-to-market process. RFID-tagged harvest bins, pallets, shipping containers and any other types of containers are automatically tracked with fixed or handheld RFID readers and the data is collected by the iMotion system in real-time. This identification and tracking data can be enhanced with sensor input regarding temperature, sanitation, humidity, speed tilt, tampering and other criteria to provide comprehensive documentation of conditions.”

One key feature and/or benefit about GlobeRanger’s asset tracking solution is, according to the company, that it improves product environment integrity with real-time data. Users can monitor a product’s environment in real-time based on "user-defined rules concerning temperature, humidity, shock/shake and/or dwell time." Users can also be automatically sent alerts "using customer preferred formats from email notifications to beeps and visual display.”

Tech Mahindra: From Farm to Fork in Real-Time

Digital transformation, consulting and business re-engineering solutions provider Tech Mahindraoffers "Farm-to-Fork," an end-­to­-end supply chain visibility solution for fresh produce, meat and frozen foods, milk and dairy products, package foods, and beverages and confectioneries. Farm-to-Fork helps companies in the food industry transport produce and meat grown at farms hundreds of miles away and deliver it as fresh as if it were locally grown.

Tech Mahindra's Farm-to-Fork service combines machine data with enterprise data “to orchestrate the supply chain" by improving visibility and enabling real-time decision making, which ensures that perishable items’ freshness is maintained during the journey from farm to grocery store. According to the company,

the Farm-to-Fork service “integrates the power of telematics, sensors and various telecommunications technologies to provide a comprehensive solution where mission-critical data is captured and sent to business analytics servers. The solution enables real-time alerts/notifications on threshold violations. It also monitors the real-time position of the vehicle. All of this ensures that quality of produce is monitored across its journey from the farm to the fork, and corrective actions are taken on a predictive basis to avoid quality deterioration. If and when quality deterioration occurs, the solution provides traceability and audit data that prevents the re-occurrence of such events.”

Watch the video below for more information about Tech Mahindra's Farm-to-Fork service:

Putting It All into Perspective

Up to one third of all food is spoiled or squandered before it is consumed by people according to theUN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). “Food loss and food waste refer to the decrease of food in subsequent stages of the food supply chain intended for human consumption,” the FAO states on their website. “Food is lost or wasted throughout the supply chain, from initial production down to final household consumption. The decrease may be accidental or intentional, but ultimately leads to less food available for all.”

The Institute of Mechanical Engineers puts that figure higher, estimating that half of all food is wasted worldwide in their 2013 report, "Waste Not, Want Not." With current practices "wasting up to 50 percent of all food produced," the report states, "engineers need to act now and promote sustainable ways to reduce waste from the farm to the supermarket and to the consumer."

Now, real-time traceability and monitoring systems for agricultural products that are based on wireless sensor networks—like the ones offered by GlobeRanger, Tech Mahindra Ltd.—are in the position to help reduce the amount of food spoiled worldwide by helping the food industry track food in real-time, from the farm right to your breakfast, lunch or dinner plate.

Here’s what your kitchen could look like in 10 years

According to Ikea, that is.

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A workspace in Ikea's Concept Kitchen 2025

Image: Ikea

A SMART TABLE that suggests recipes for leftover food and a “mindful” water system to make amateur chefs more aware of how they use the resource - this is the kitchen of the future as imagined by Ikea.

The Swedish flat-pack furniture chain asked London-based design company IDEO, together with students from two universities, to build a 2025 concept kitchen for a pop-up exhibit for the Milan expo.

The students spent months researching people’s attitudes and ideas about cooking and eating, and IDEO designers guided them as they built concept kitchen products,” the company said.

The designers based their concepts on the idea that kitchens would evolve to suit people’s changed living situations in the future, when it was predicted there would be more city-dwellers in smaller homes with near-instant food delivery shifting the way people shopped for and kept their groceries.

Source: Ikea

Here are a few highlights from the concept, which is heavy with Internet of Things gadgetry:

A “table for living” to get people to waste less food. Home cooks can place a food item on the work surface and, using a camera, it will identify what the ingredient is before recommending dishes, complete with cooking instructions. Irish-run startup Drop hasalready been selling similar technology with its smart kitchen scales.

Source: Ikea

A “thoughtful disposal system” to remind people what they’re throwing away by making them manually sort through material for recycling, which is then crushed, vacuum packed and labelled for collection.

Source: Ikea

A “mindful water system” to help people be more aware of their water usage. It has to be tipped from side-to-side to differentiate between toxic “black” water and “grey” water, which can be reused in a dishwasher or garden.

Source: Ikea

A “modern pantry” in which food is all on display, rather than hidden in the back of a cupboard, to get people to be more “inspired” to cook with what is on hand.

Source: Ikea

Ikea’s Gerry Dufrense told ZDNet the future kitchen would have computers and technology “everywhere”, but a key element would be “preserving the tactile creative pleasure” of the space.

Technology could easily make the space feel robotic and sterile, but this project was guided by the need to keep tech in the background.”

Does Your Dog Eat Organic? Meet The 'Human Grade' Pet Food Startup

Lucy Postins, Founder and CEO of The Honest Kitchen (Credit: Ethan Pines for Forbes)

This story appears in the July 20, 2015 issue of Forbes.

The Honest Kitchen proves there’s no limit to what Americans will spend on their pets.

Willow and Taro Postins come to work every day at The Honest Kitchen’s San Diego headquarters in the shadow of Petco Park. Their boss and adoptive mother, Lucy Postins, concedes that neither is an ideal employee. They rarely follow instructions, gently harass visitors and fight openly in the hallway.

Of course, Willow and Taro are Postins’ dogs, purebred Rhodesian Ridgebacks whose ancestors were raised to hunt lions, not perform office tasks. And they’re just 2 of the 12 canines who roam the office, nearly as numerous as the 23 human employees. At The Honest Kitchen, “Must love dogs” is an actual job requirement.

That’s because Postins is on a mission to sell pet food that she claims is above and beyond the quality of even the most luxurious kibble. It says so right on the box, which proclaims that the food within is “Human Grade.” The dehydrated substance looks like granola put through a blender–just add water–but the ingredient list sounds like it comes from a four-star, farm-to-table restaurant: free-range chicken, cage-free duck, sweet potatoes, pumpkin, cranberries.

“They’re the same ingredients that I feed my human family,” says Postins, 40. “To me it’s not gourmet, it’s just common sense.”

Postins, who founded the company 13 years ago in her kitchen, isn’t marketing to the average pet owner. She’s looking for dog and cat lovers who shop at Whole Foods and wouldn’t serve nonorganic, genetically modified food to their human families. So far, of the $20 billion pet food market, The Honest Kitchen has captured $21 million in annual revenue, and the company projects growth of nearly 50% this year.

While going upmarket has long been a lucrative strategy in pet food, Postins’ tactics take a page from the human food playbook. Just as startup brands are beating industry giants like Kraft Foods and Campbell’s Soup by hawking healthier and more natural options, The Honest Kitchen and others, such as Blue Buffalo, which recently filed to raise as much as half a billion dollars in an IPO, have challenged the pet establishment. The Honest Kitchen is testing the limits, charging up to $120 for a 10-pound box of dog food (that becomes 40 pounds with water).

The Honest Kitchen’s grain-free recipes are more expensive.

Early on Postins had no idea such a market existed. The U.K. native settled in San Diego in 1998, following her husband, Charlie, who was designing cars for Nissan. While a marketing manager at premium-kibble-maker Solid Gold, Postins read online that a raw diet might alleviate the persistent ear infections suffered by Mosi, her previous Ridgeback. The fad, which veterinary experts question, encourages owners to serve animals uncooked vegetables and meat, supposedly replicating what their ancestors ate in the wild.

But serving raw ingredients at home can be expensive, messy and even dangerous because of the bacteria. Postins wondered whether a dehydrated form might work–and began to see the potential for a microbusiness that would sell her concoctions mostly to friends. With no professional experience, she cold-called dehydrated-food production plants. Most turned her down, worried that their human clients would freak out if they knew the facilities were also being used to prepare dog food.

In 2002, after Charlie extended a $7,000 seed loan, Lucy quit her day job, but the first production effort failed. Her vision was muesli-like, with recognizable chunks of food. Instead, the manufacturer pulverized her expensive meats and vegetables (which Postins says cost at least twice as much as typical pet food ingredients) into what looked like a fine flour. After figuring out production, she began passing out samples at local dog parks. Then in September 2002 she put up a website and was stunned to get a quick online order from a customer in North Carolina. She was so excited that she spent $38 to overnight $32 worth of product.

Postins spent the next two years operating The Honest Kitchen out of her home, even packing boxes in the garage the night before giving birth to the first of her two children. In 2007, after the business began shipping 220 orders per week, Charlie quit his job at Nissan to help shore up the operation, which by then had eight employees. Six months later he had to take a consultant gig to help pay the bills. “Lucy had done an incredible thing getting us to this point, but there was an obvious need for development of the business,” says Charlie, now the full-time president and second-in-command to his CEO wife.

The operational struggles continued. In 2009, when Postin’s first CFO wasted $250,000 on an expensive data-processing software system too advanced for their fledgling operation, Postins cried when she briefly feared she might not make payroll for her ten employees. It was, she believes, her insistence on maintaining the human-grade label, implying a level of quality beyond competing products, that saw The Honest Kitchen through its growing pains.

Lucy Postins with Willow and Taro, her Rhodesian Ridgebacks. (Credit: Ethan Pines for Forbes)

To maintain the label, the company has to comply with strict regulatory oversight of its sourcing and production. But not everyone believes those efforts have value. Dr. Lisa Freeman, professor of nutrition at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, says the fancy ingredients are likely no better for pets than less expensive food. “There are many myths across the pet industry these days,” says Dr. Freeman. “Ingredient lists are just marketing, and unfortunately consumers are basing their decisions on that marketing.”

Postins does in fact spend $1.2 million a year on marketing. Despite working in an office a block from a baseball stadium named for Petco, she refuses to distribute through that or any of the big chains, choosing instead to sell only online and through independent pet stores.

In 2011 The Honest Kitchen brought in investors, raising $5 million in two funding rounds led by ACG, a backer of high-end burger chain Shake Shack. The investment allowed Postins to hire professional staff, increasing her head count to 40, including 15 salespeople. She hopes to return to profitability this year but says the company will never shed its “pets before profits” ethos. In fact, she recently spiked a potentially lucrative deal with a distributor in Japan. The reason? It sells to stores that carry dogs raised in puppy mills.

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McDonald's, KFC Go High-Tech in China With Customization, E-Payments

Doug Young ,

CONTRIBUTOR

Bottom line: KFC’s and McDonald’s latest moves to add high-tech elements to their China stores are a savvy way to update their images, and could help to attract a younger trendy crowd that has abandoned both chains in recent years.

Leading global fast food chains McDonald’s and KFC are both in the headlines as we head into the heart of summer, each trying new high-tech approaches to reignite their faltering China stories. Announcement of these latest initiatives seems especially appropriate right now, as we’re approaching the first anniversary of a food safety scandal that dealt a major blow to both chains in China.

KFC’s deal will see it pair up with Alibaba to offer its affiliated Alipay electronic payments service at hundreds of its China stores. The McDonald’s news is similarly high-tech, and will see the chain extend its new state-of-the-art hamburger customization program to the China market.

Both initiatives are aimed at breathing new life into these 2 chains that were early pioneers in China’s restaurant scene but have lately become stale due to the entry of many younger, trendier brands to the market. Both KFC and McDonald’s were already struggling when they suffered a major setback last July after an investigative report showed one their main suppliers regularly sold meat that was past its expiration date. 

The pair had each separately launched a major re-branding campaign even before that scandal, and these latest moves look like extensions of that overhaul. Let’s begin with KFC, whose alliance with China’s leading e-commerce company should help to win the company new customers among the millions of users of Alipay, a Chinese equivalent of PayPal.

According to the reports, the alliance has seen KFC recently start to accept Alipay for electronic payments at 700 of its stores in Shanghai and nearby Zhejiang province. It plans to extend the program to the rest of its 4,500 China stores nationwide, as part of a campaign by both partners to build up their online-to-offline (O2O) businesses that brings together traditional retailers and Internet-based service providers.

In another prong of its high-tech push, KFC said it already has rolled out wi-fi in 2,200 of its China stores, and 500 stores now have an online menu app. This kind of overhaul looks smart, and should appeal to the new generation of online-savvy young Chinese consumers. KFC’s China restaurants are expected to return to same-store sales growth this year after a long period of declines, and these kinds of steps might be the medicine it needs to sustain that growth over the longer term.

Have It Your Way, High-Tech

Next let’s look at McDonald’s, which is preparing to roll out its “Create Your Taste” program in China that lets customers customize their hamburgers with the condiments they want. McDonald’s launched the program in the US on a trial basis, and has been expanding it aggressively there since late last year. The program is decidedly high tech by allowing customers to use kiosks to customize their burgers, in another variation of the O2O drive to be trendier and more gadgety.

McDonald’s will take a slow approach in China with the concept, which will be limited this year to a pilot program of 3 stores in Shanghai and one in the southern city of Guangzhou, according to a company executive. The program will be expanded next year to the cities of Beijing and Shenzhen, though the pace of expansion will be determined based on results of the pilot program.

The fact that McDonald’s is moving the program so quickly to China reflects the importance of the market, which will become only the company’s 6th worldwide to trial the program. Like the KFC tie-up, this program also looks like a savvy move with high-tech overtones that could help McDonald’s start to regain some of the momentum it has lost in China over the last few years.

I seldom visit either McDonald’s or KFC in China anymore, partly because I’ve become more health conscious, and also for the same reasons that many Chinese consumers have abandoned them. But I’ll admit that many of these initiative are piquing my curiosity and tempting me to return, which could bode well for both chains’ turnaround prospects if Chinese consumers feel similarly.