Digital food control systems are the key to ensuring that safe and healthy food is accessible and affordable for everyone. Population growth and climate change threaten to push global food supplies to their limits in the years and decades ahead. Modern technology is essential to building an innovative food and agriculture supply chain.
Advantages of Digital Food Control Systems
Digital food control systems are the future of global food production and the agricultural supply chain. The global population is estimated to be over 9.8 billion people by 2050. Supplying enough food for all those people will require monumental innovation in food production and supply chains.
Digital food control systems can help maximize the amount of food that is safe to eat and readily available to the people who need it. Using a combination of cutting-edge technologies, digital food control systems streamline, automate, and evolve food production and monitoring.
Digital Communications
For example, food retailers, farmers, and production companies must maintain detailed records about where their supplies have traveled and the conditions in which they have been kept. This ensures that food can be confirmed healthy and free of contaminants, from farms to consumers.
E-notification systems can be used in digital food control to communicate clearly and quickly with supply chain partners. This makes it much easier to maintain the records needed to ensure food safety. In fact, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has even released specific guidelines on how to implement e-notification systems in food and agriculture businesses in an effort to help innovate digital food control.
The Internet of Things
Similarly, IoT devices are revolutionizing pest control in the food and agriculture industry. Pests pose a severe threat to food security. If a large production facility suffers an infestation, it could eliminate large amounts of food from communities all over the region and potentially in other states and countries.
Suppliers and production companies can ensure around-the-clock monitoring using IoT devices and the cloud by integrating modern pest control technology into digital food control systems. Digital pest control systems can alert food companies immediately at the first signs of the presence of pests, stopping infestations before they can start. As a result, more food can be produced while ensuring safety and cleanliness for consumers.
Predictive Analytics
IoT technology can also help food processing and production companies optimize their operations and predict potential issues before they occur. One benefit of integrating IoT devices into digital food control systems is the wealth of data that IoT devices can gather in real-time. In fact, developing the use of predictive analytics in agriculture is one of the core principles of the U.S. FDA’s blueprint for smarter food safety.
The large amounts of data collected in a digital food control system can reveal insights into production trends and predictions about future outcomes. For example, IoT data may reveal that a leafy greens processing facility may be experiencing excess moisture buildup in cleaning equipment.
A predictive analytics system could identify this trend and warn facility managers that the trend could potentially lead to health and safety issues. Predictive analytics allows food processing and production companies and even farmers to get ahead of potential challenges and avoid major setbacks.
Ensuring Food Security Around the World
For decades, leaders in the food and agriculture industry have been working hard to develop systems that produce clean, healthy food for as many people as possible. Even as early as 1906, leaders, like Dr. Mary Engle Pennington, were campaigning for regulations that would ensure everyone had access to truly healthy food that was ensured safe to eat.
Today, those efforts continue in the digital food control movement. Innovation can be a challenge in any industry, but ensuring food security worldwide is critical for the livelihood of billions. As climate change threatens agricultural production in the years ahead, effective food control systems will be vital to making the most of every single food resource available.
Feeding the Planet With Digital Food Control Systems
Digital food control systems are the future of the food and agriculture supply chain. Innovation is crucial to food security as the population grows and climate change forever alters agriculture. With digital technology, food control systems can ensure there is enough to feed the planet with safe, healthy, and wholesome food.
