Don’t jump out of your seat while reading the title. I have no intentions of saying that your food will be haunted with spirits and will interact with you as a living being. Though I hardly intend to say anything dissimilar too. However, my comments shared as follows don’ deal with the paranormal or supernatural stuff, but rather technology application that will breathe into life through Internet of Things and Connected Logistics.
When food reached from farm to your table, you hardly have any visibility on its health during its transportation and storage. You hardly get some information sometimes about temperature checks and receipt or dispatch of your ordered food items, in case your vendor happens to be tech-savvy. However, you don’t get any idea of the nutritional value that your ordered fruits and vegetables carry and how they dip during the transit from one point of supply chain to another. This is where IoT is going to spell a digital transformation and is going to make you aware of the vital parameters of fruits and vegetables at all times, from harvest to home, crate to consumption. Yes, you will get to know all of it as your consignment of food speaks to you every minute, every second, whenever you want.
Food says “Hi” during order
As you order something online, your consignment will be shown and your address and Customer ID will be tagged to a specific Crate ID. The Crate ID will be assigned to a specific smart crate that will carry your ordered fruits and vegetables. This crate will be equipped with temperature sensors, pressure sensors, humidity checkers, weight monitors and hordes of other sensors which keep a track of all the vital parameters of your food. Now, the moment fruits and vegetables are physically added to the smart crate or the smart container, the monitoring will begin instantly. Your smart crate will say a “Hi” to you through a smartphone notification and will talk to you about its health. Something like:
Temperature: x degree Celsius
Humidity: y%
Weight: z kilograms
Harvested: 2 days back
Fresh until: 3 days
Location: New Town
The initially monitored values will be made available to the buyer, so that the buyer can keep a track of the change and anomaly in the vital climate conditions that the crate is in.
Talking during the transit
While the smart crate moves ahead along the supply chain, it will relay the necessary information to the consumers. For example, if the smart crate is inside a truck, it will relay information on its GPS location and its health condition regularly to the buyer. The buyer will also be presented with a visualization of the change in vital parameters in the form of graphs. The nutritional value will be under check and will be calculated according to the change in the parameters. It will feel as if your friend is talking to you during her travel.
The notifications may also not require a special app. Common chat platforms, like WhatsApp, will be good enough to interact with you over a business channel. You can ask queries, like “SEND LOCATION” or “TELL ME YOUR CALORIE VALUE”, and the backend Natural Language Processing engine will understand and respond to your query autonomously. The entire data relayed to you will be passed on to a distributed ledger, like Blockchain, and will be stored in an immutable fashion.
Swift Tracked Delivery by air
Once the smart crate reaches the last point in the supply chain – the pickup center – drones will report to pick the items for the buyer. Drones will airlift your crate and will transport them to buyer’s doorstep swiftly, without much of traffic obstructions. The monitoring will still continue as the fruits and vegetables are still in the crate. The buyer will get live location of the drone as the GPS tracking is provided by the smart crate.
Once delivered at the doorstep, the buyer shall receive a notification requesting for payment on the chat window. The integrated payment gateways shall enable digital payment through smart contracts, following which the delivery process will be completed and a QR code will be generated following the payment. The byer shall place the code in front of a camera for scanning and the crate will be handed over to the buyer following the authentication.
Smart racks reveal secrets about the food
Once you place the food items in shelves of a refrigerator or racks in the kitchen, the IoT sensors shall again monitor the health of the fruits and vegetables, and let you know through audible message or inaudible notifications about the nutritional value and freshness level of the food items. This will ensure that you are aware of what you have got in your basket and what you are going to consume. The containers of the food items will confide the secrets of nutrition to you, regardless of what the vendor has told you, thereby helping in transparency and validation.
Food says goodbye on the dining table
Once the food has been prepared, a scan of the dish using an image analytics app will reveal approximate amount of oil, spices and other ingredients that have gone into the preparation, and will calculate the approximate calories that one will be consuming. As the food says goodbye while touching our taste-buds, we will be in complete knowledge of what we are consuming, what it had been before being taken from the farm and how it has changed over the course of few days.
Closing thoughts
Food analytics is going to be an integral part of our lives soon. As the society gets increasingly health-conscious and the concern over staying safe from diseases rises, we will have more and more of our tech-savvy population consume the food analytics services. Right from the harvest to the home, the ordered food will talk to us and will update us on its health every moment we want it to. The future of food is the food that talks to us!
