Waiter, there’s a chip in my soup!

First published in The Star, July 14, 2015

We generally don’t associate technology with food – they seem inherently incompatible.  Technology is cold, metallic and digital, while food is – well, food! – comforting, organic, nourishing and something to be looked forward to.  And yet, invisible as it may be, technology can and does play a big part in the modern food chain, from tracking inventories to supply chain management.  This article highlights a couple of lesser-known examples.

The case for detecting food borne diseases

In 2011, more than 50 people died and about 4,000 were sickened following an E. coli bacteria outbreak in Germany that originated from contaminated sprouts. It took public health officials 60 days and thousands of case reports before the outbreak cause was identified.  In the process, Russia banned food imports from the EU, imports of cucumbers from Spain were wrongly identified, with Spain claiming economic losses in the millions of dollars.  The cause of the outbreak was finally identified as sprouts from a farm in Germany.

About 3,000 people die from contaminated food each year in the U.S. alone. Recently, grocery stores in the U.S. and Canada were forced to remove spinach suspected to be contaminated with Listeria, which can cause listeriosis, a serious and sometimes deadly infection.

Outbreaks of food-borne diseases can be costly, both in economic and social terms, but the folks at IBM Research may have come up with a better way. 

Its breakthrough smart-analytics system can parse through data gathered from public health departments and food retailers to not only track but also predict contaminations in the food supply, which can help accelerate action.

Once an outbreak occurs, the IBM tool can identify contaminated products using as few as 10 outbreak case reports. Employing algorithms, visualization and statistical techniques, the system sorts through date and location data on billions of products in the food supply.

“Predictive analytics based on location, content and context are driving our ability to quickly discover hidden patterns and relationships from diverse public health and retail data,” said James Kaufman, manager of public health research for IBM Research.

To demonstrate the IBM tool’s effectiveness, researchers worked with the Department of Biological Safety of the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment. They simulated 60,000 outbreaks of food-borne disease across 600 products using real-world food sales data from Germany. The scientists were able to identify the contaminated product with “better than 80 percent confidence and fewer than 20 clinical cases,” Kaufman said. “That’s much faster than is typically possible today.”

For IBM, the next step for the analytics tool includes scaling up the research prototype in the U.S., according to Kaufman.

How do you know where the food’s from, and where it’s been?

The use of technology in food may be more pervasive that you think, and it may be transparent as well:  one such technology, called “food traceability”, refers to the ability to trace the pathways that food takes before landing in the supermarket shelf, or on your plate. 

Technology has advanced to the point where a piece of food can be traced right back to its origins, or what the industry calls “Farm to Fork”.  Often this involves the use of RFID tags or barcodes to track the progress of food through the supply chain.

Food traceability can be useful in various cases, for example, in food-borne disease outbreaks, in being able to isolate and trace the source quickly. This can have a dramatic impact on social and economic costs.

Another example may be in quality assurance. If the product is premium meat, for example, how can the producer be sure that a lower-grade, inferior product has not been substituted and sold under its brand name?  Food traceability can assure the buyer of the origins of the product, thereby ensuring the authenticity and justifying the price premium.

The tracking of food items over periods of time can result in large data stores, and further analysis of the collected data can yield yet further benefits in streamlining the supply chain, and understanding historical patterns of demand and supply – for example, festive periods – so that suppliers can anticipate and prepare accordingly. 

These are just a couple of examples of where food and technology intersect, so the next time you shop at a market, bear in mind that there may well have been some technology involved in bringing the item to the shelf. 

Lee Yu Kit is the Chief Technology Officer of IBM Malaysia Sdn Bhd.