Within five years, we’ll eliminate many of the costly unknowns in the food supply chain. From farmers to grocery suppliers, each participant in the supply chain will know exactly how much to plant, order, and ship. Food loss will diminish greatly and the produce that ends up in consumers’ carts will be fresher—when blockchain technology, IoT devices, and AI algorithms join forces.
Within five years, food safety inspectors around the world will gain a new superpower: the ability to use millions of microbes to protect what we eat. These microbes—some healthy for human consumption, others not—are regularly introduced into foods at farms, factories, and grocery stores. Thanks to a new technique that enables us to analyze their genetic make-up cost effectively, microbes will tell us a lot about the safety of what we consume.
Within five years, the world’s farmers, food processors, and grocers—along with its billions of home cooks—will be able to detect dangerous contaminants effortlessly in their food. All they’ll need is a cell phone or a countertop with AI sensors. IBM researchers are creating powerful, portable AI sensors that can detect food-borne pathogens anywhere and everywhere they might turn up. These mobile bacteria sensors could dramatically increase the speed of a pathogen test from days to seconds, allowing individuals up and down the food chain to detect the existence of harmful E. coli or Salmonella before it becomes an outbreak.
In five years, the disposal of trash and the creation of new plastics will be completely transformed. Everything from milk cartons to cookie containers to grocery bags and cheese cloths will be recyclable, and polyester manufacturing companies will be able to take in refuse and turn it into something useful. This transition will be powered by innovations like VolCat, a catalytic chemical process that digests certain plastics (called polyesters) into a substance that can be fed directly back into plastic manufacturing machines in order to make new products.
AI for Supply Chain: We're creating reusable toolkits infused with AI, for functions such as demand forecasting, inventory positioning, omni-channel fulfillment and returns, multi-tier network analysis, and more.