REAL-TIME TRACKING OF FOOD FLOWS USING THE INTERNET OF THINGS TECHNOLOGIES AND GEOSPATIAL DATA
If you have found or were given a Smart Avocado tracker, please visit https://www.utwente.nl/en/smartavocado/trackerfound/.
Our project:
Food today is often produced thousands of kilometers away from where it is consumed, making it challenging to track the farm of origin and routes. Current norms in science use country origins and national aggregates, oversimplifying the environmental impacts that can vary 50-fold across farms.
The Smart Avocado project is experimenting with a monitoring system to track avocados, an imported, water-hungry product, using the latest Internet-of-Things technologies. The Smart Avocados are GPS-equipped avocado replicas deployed in real avocado production sites in South Africa. By transmitting their exact geolocation, the trackers allow tracing the journey of the fruit, from the production site to the packhouse, from country roads to the cargo ship, and finally to the local reseller in the Netherlands. This creates a high-resolution map of food flow, enabling our understanding of the environmental impact of the avocado trade.
The Smart Avocado project aims to pave the way for improved monitoring methods of food flows. Through enabling the monitoring of the origin and the trajectory, we can ultimately improve our understanding of the environmental impact of imported food (such as water use and CO2 emissions). Our vision is to encourage sustainable consumer behaviors and business models to govern sustainable food trade.
Watch our presentation video:
Our partners:
Smart Avocado is a NWO-funded project. We are partnering for this research with the University of Limpopo and local community and supply chain actor Westfalia Fruit.
