FreshSense: Transforming Supply Chains with Low-Cost and Dynamic Food Quality Sensing at the Pallet-Level

Abstract

Food wastage is a pervasive issue that affects millions of people worldwide. Approximately 40% of produced food goes to waste after harvest[1], while 10% of the world's population goes to bed hungry each night[2]. The food industry is also known to have some of the highest emissions, and the environmental impact from produce that gets wasted post-harvest is a significant overhead to the industry's carbon footprint. On these accounts, there is an imminent need to detect and reduce food loss. In an effort to reduce such loss, in this work, we ask the question: Can we use wireless technology to track the change in food quality and nutrition, post-harvest, as it travels through the global supply chain? Current methods for monitoring food quality are sparse and prone to manual error. Literature shows that moisture content in produce is a good proxy for quality and nutritionnutrition[3,12]. However, the inability to accurately and efficiently track moisture content at scale leads to substantial loss. To address this challenge, we propose FreshSense, a novel wireless sensing system that enables real-time, non-invasive monitoring of moisture content in produce as it moves through the supply chain.