1. A landscape that is changing forever
There are many aspects of the agri-food industry that require data; improving yield, optimizing the manufacturing process, improving quality and safety or increasing sales. These days we have the technology and devices to collect a plethora of data from different stages of the supply chain. Starting from the field we collect soil, trial, health, protection and phenotyping data, for the plant and crop, genetic data for both seed and plant, environmental data from sensors and image data collected by drones and satellites. As soon as the product is harvested, a wealth of new data related to its origin, nutritional info, logistics, certificates, processing, marketing and sales is generated until it reaches the consumer.
The generated data for each food product is vast, heterogeneous and dynamic. In the near future, the amount of data will increase tremendously as new devices are continuously launching. In such a data landscape, integration and extraction of knowledge is a major challenge.
2. Ready for our Challenges
This is the perfect timing for us. We love data challenges. We are committed to finding solutions that improve agricultural and food production. We focus on building products that are based on data and transform data into knowledge using Big Data and Artificial Intelligence technologies. We have developed a big data processing workflow, especially for the agrifood domain, that can mine large amounts of heterogeneous data. We are also developing models able to predict risk and yield.
3. We serve something bigger than us
Our main goal is to empower experts that are working in the food supply chain by delivering the most sophisticated tools and critical data. We want to help them solve difficult data problems and develop better and safer food products.
Our product development strategy is aligned with our vision of sustainable agricultural production and a safe food supply chain.
3. Foodakai is part of a bigger picture
In today’s complex global food supply chain, being fully aware of emerging and increasing risks is a challenge. Missing something critical, and preventable costs the food industry a lot of money. To address this challenge, we launched a data product: FOODAKAI (www.foodakai.com), which helps food companies identify and minimize food safety risks for their products. FOODAKAI is an intelligent online system that integrates global and publicly available food safety data from a large number of diverse and heterogeneous data sources, and mines this information to deliver trends and potential risks to the food safety and quality experts working in the industry.
4. On our next challenges
We already serve several large companies and organizations and our next milestone is making our FOODAKAI product a powerful and affordable service for small companies in the food supply chain. We are aware of their limited resources and want to assist them in acquiring the knowledge they need, regarding food safety risks, so they can prevent food safety incidents. We want to work with them to enhance their food safety approach so they can attract more customers and deliver safer foods.
In addition to that, the next important step is to create a data bridge between the agricultural field and processing and retail facilities. We want to deliver critical data from the field that companies need to make data-informed decisions about the quality and safety of the raw materials they are using and/or selling.