An integrated system to track and monitor food flows and prevent its waste
Food Market 4.0 Dashboard is a system of HW and SW solutions to track and monitor the flow of fruit and vegetables in covered markets in Milan.
It is composed of a set of reusable crates, a Smart Scale, a Smart Gate system, and a Dashboard for recognizing and tracking products entering and leaving the market through digitised checkpoints and tags; monitoring direct sales and those made through delivery services, and collecting and aggregating data on product flow to prevent food waste.
Local
Italy
The Food Market 4.0 Dashboard project involved the Municipality of Milan (REFLOW project partner) in the co-design phase of the scenario. The experimentation of the Food Market 4.0 Dashboard project took place within one of the covered municipal markets in Milan (Morsenchio Market) thanks to the collaboration of the market manager and the greengrocer.
Mainly urban
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
Yes
Horizon2020 / Horizon Europe
REFLOW - constRuctive mEtabolic processes For materiaL flOWs in urban and peri-urban environments across Europe is a Horizon 2020 Project (2019-2022, https://reflowproject.eu/; https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/820937/it). Food Market 4.0 Dashboard is one of the solutions implemented within the Milan Pilot Project on circular metabolisms of municipal food market.
No
Yes
2022-05-31
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): Politecnico di Milano - Department of Design - Polifactory Type of organisation: University or another research institution First name of representative: Stefano Last name of representative: Maffei Gender: Male Nationality: Italy If relevant, please select your other nationality: Italy Function: Director of Polifactory (Makerspace - FabLab of Politecnico di Milano Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: via Durando, 10 Town: Milan Postal code: 20158 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 335 541 1280 E-mail:stefano.maffei@polimi.it Website:https://reflowproject.eu/blog/food-market-4-0-dashboard/
In recent years, municipal markets in many cities have been the subject of revitalization actions aimed at promoting projects and initiatives concerning the sustainability and circularity of urban agrifood systems. The City of Milan is starting to consider the municipal food markets as actors stimulating the transition towards circular business models based on sustainable processes of access, consumption, and use of products and services linked to the agri-food system.
The food policy of the Municipality of Milan foresees the reorganization of the system of covered markets which includes:
- a new management model for the markets which favors their recovery and revitalization considering sustainability and circularity as relevant aspects;
- a more integrated and sustainable model of the relationship between the wholesale market (So.Ge.Mi, the largest in Italy) and the network of covered markets.
The field research carried out in the Milan pilot showed that at present:
- local markets do not have an adequate level of digitalization (lack of digital infrastructure, traders with deficient digital skills, etc.) enabling them to manage and monitor food flows;
- there is no integrated system for tracking food (especially fruit and vegetables) from the wholesale market to covered markets.
The Food Market 4.0 Dashboard is an integrated system of HW/SW solutions for municipal markets which aim to prevent food waste. FM4.0D includes inventory tracking, logistics planning, and controlling for the inbound and outbound fruit and vegetables flowing through municipal markets. Additionally, FM4.0D also provides physical touchpoints such as a smart scale and reusable boxes with integrated RFID. The FM4.0D includes all actors along the process of fruits and vegetable flow and standardizes the process and enables producers to trace goods from the producer to the vendor. Through the gathered data, they can optimize their actions, resulting in an overall waste reduction.
Circular Transition
Digital Transformation
Urban Food Systems
Municipal Food Markets
Food Flows Monitoring
Food Market 4.0 Dashboard is a solution implemented within the Milan Pilot of the REFLOW Project (https://reflowproject.eu/, a Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Action, 2019-2022) that aims to develop circular and regenerative cities through enabling active citizen involvement and systemic change to re-think the current approach to material flows in cities. The project utilizes Fab Labs and makerspaces as catalysts for change in urban and peri-urban environments.
In recent years, municipal markets in many cities have been the subject of revitalization and regeneration actions aimed at promoting projects and initiatives concerning the sustainability and circularity of urban agrifood systems. Municipal food markets can be considered actors stimulating the transition towards circular business models based on sustainable processes of access, consumption, and use of products and services linked to the agri-food system.
The Food Market 4.0 solution is an integrated system of both hardware and software conceived to support municipal markets in better managing food flows to prevent food waste.
The entire Food Market 4.0 Dashboard System is designed to introduce a user (management) experience related to food tracking within the municipal market network. The System FM4.0D has been designed to be installed and used within existing shops and markets (stalls, warehouses, vans, etc.) directly by the greengrocers. The installation of the FM4.0D system in the stall required no intervention in the shop and warehouse and no adaptation of the existing equipment. During the test at Morsenchio Market the Smart Scale, the Smart Gates and a set of smart and reusable crates have been used to test all the activities (check-in, warehousing, sale, refill) measuring data related to the quantity and type of fruit and vegetables entering and leaving the market. The market greengrocer tested the prototype supported by the Polifactory team that provides some basic guidelines and instructions. Despite a lack of digital skills, the greengrocer has been able to use the smart crates to track food flows starting from the basic functions offered by the digital dashboard.
The test has allowed us to understand how to approach the digital transformation of covered markets, stressing two aspects: the importance of developing technological solutions capable of integrating with spaces without ‘colonizing’ them, and the importance of engaging vendors in the use of technological and stimulating them to be “not the last link of a food chain but the first driver of the circular transition”.
The possibility of tracing the path of food within contexts such as municipal markets, characterized by a high level of socialization, offers the possibility of generating data useful for studying food habits and behavior within urban areas or neighborhoods, correlating them, for example, with the theme of health. Finally, the use of the FM4.0 Dashboard system can be extended to farmers, thus creating a sort of "digital twin" of food flows in a Farm to Fork logic, creating a digital experience.
The Food Market 4.0 Dashboard System is designed considering an inclusive and open logics.
In particular, the design and prototyping of Open Scale and Open Gate, the open-source version of the Smart Scale and Smart Gate systems represents one the key aspects. In this way, Food Market 4.0 Dashboard in addition to being a hybrid system of standard HW/SW elements also has the possibility of being composed, integrated, or replaced by open-source units. Open Scale is a Smart Scale that can be controlled from a dashboard via a tablet and complemented by an information display for market customers. The idea behind Open Scale is to provide an instrument composed of standard components (some of which are already certified) and others created through digital fabrication. Open Scale is a system designed to be customisable in various components and sizes according to different weighing needs, different types of goods to be weighed, and different commercial activities.
Open Gate is a system consisting of an RFID beacon amplified by a high-frequency antenna and complemented by a smart device that allows the monitoring of temperature, humidity, and the position of goods, even while on the move. The system is mounted on an extensible rod that allows placement on different types of gates, gates in places such as warehouses, cold stores, vans, and trucks, to track the routes and storage conditions of products.
The openness of FM4.0D offer the opportunity to scale, replicate, adapt, and adopt this system and its solutions by involving actors and stakeholders that could expand the circular transition of the urban agri-food system. For example, it is possible to use this system for social innovation scopes involving citizens, associations, and institutions in projects and initiatives aiming at tracking and tracing donated food.
The Food Market 4.0 Dashboard is designed for monitoring inbound and outbound products (fruits and vegetables) from the municipal covered markets. generating data (and data visualization) related to tracking and monitoring activities and forecasting activities:
- type and quantities of fruits and vegetables purchased, stored, and sold (daily, monthly, and yearly) by a typical operator of a municipal market. This visualization allows to track the inbound and outbound fruit and vegetable from the municipal market;
- type and amount of food waste calculated through the difference between fruits and vegetables purchased and sold within the municipal market;
general overview of the number of fruits and vegetables purchased and sold;
- By establishing a unit cost baseline for each movement of goods between stall and warehouse a logistics cost estimation can be determined. The cost can be based on the average duration of each trade that is made, based on the assumption that when something is in motion it takes away my time for the actual sale.
This dataset aims to provide an example of what could be visualized on a city-wide scale considering all municipal market operators (for example Milan has 23 municipal covered markets). The development of a system such as FM4.0D within an urban context can help municipalities, citizens' associations, institutions and enterprises to understand what the granular distribution and dissemination of food sales flows in neighbourhoods looks like by providing useful information in the development of polices and initiatives to combat food waste, to stimulate better foodstyle behaviours, etc.
The actors involved in the Food Market 4.0 scenario and pilot are:
- the wholesale market So.Ge.Mi as an actor interested in understanding the functioning of the tracking and monitoring of fruit and vegetable flows towards covered markets in function of the development of the Foody Hub.
- the covered market of Morsenchio and the consortium that manages it as an actor that host the experimentation of the Food Market 4.0 Dashboard system (in perspective replicable in other markets);
- the Mazzucchi Ortofrutta shop as an actor that experiments the functioning of the Food Market 4.0 Dashboard system (in perspective adoptable by other vendors);
- the Politecnico di Milano as the actor that conceived, developed, and modelled the whole design and prototyping process of the Food Market 4.0 Dashboard system;
- the Municipality of Milan as an actor interested in the development of innovation initiatives that are part of the Food Policy;
- CPR System, a company specialised in providing services for circularity in agro-food distribution systems that have voluntarily collaborated in the experimentation of the Food Market 4.0 Dashboard system.
The co-creation and co-design process of Food Market 4.0 Dashboard benefited from multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary dynamics and knowledge.
From a multi-disciplinary point of view, the FM4.0D project is developed thanks to the collaboration between design (product-service system design, strategic design, transition design) and computer science (electronics and informatics) with the possibility of developing smart IoT systems that combine hardware and software designed to adapt and integrate easily in contexts such as covered markets where environments and users (operators and customers) have on average a low level of digitalization.
From an interdisciplinary point of view, the FM4.0D project used the practice, approach, and skills typical of making and places such as makerspaces and fab labs for the proof-of-concept phase.
From a transdisciplinary perspective, the FM4.0D project used a collaborative process to interact with various stakeholders, and understand the context of markets and their needs in terms of circularity and traceability.
In May 2022 the proof-of-concept of the system Food Market 4.0 Dashboard and the first prototyping of Open Scale and Open Gate, the open-source version of the Smart Scale and Smart Gate systems was completed. Food Market 4.0 Dashboard, in addition to being a hybrid system of standard HW/SW elements, also has the possibility of being composed, integrated, or replaced by open-source units.
The Food Market 4.0 Dashboard system consists of:
1. Smart crates, fully recyclable, foldable, and equipped with RFID tags
2. Smart scale, a system composed of a weighing bench to which connected a webcam, an RFID reader, a mini pc.
3. Smart gate, RFID antennas positioned in the stall, warehouse, and on the means of transport;
4. Digital dashboard for monitoring and generating data on food flows.
The Food Market 4.0 Dashboard was designed to be compatible with devices commonly used by fruit and vegetable retailers. Polifactory also designed an open-source version of the Smart Scale and Smart Gate.
The Foodmarket 4.0 Dashboard includes these functionalities:
1. Hardware - Handling of goods through an efficient hardware system that avoids damage to products. The FM4.0D also provides markets with RFID integrated boxes which are reusable and standardized and are scaled with an installed smart scale. This facilitates the process of tracking and tracing and reduces packaging.
2. Check-In – Recognition and tracking of incoming and outgoing products through digitized checkpoints and tags applied to the crates used.
3. Exposure – Goods display through versatile structures for different configurations designed for market stalls.
4. Redistribution – Opens opportunities to further distribute fruits and vegetables to local corporations like local food delivery services or local NGOs or charities. The dashboard also enables the user to identify the number of surplus fruits and vegetables.
After a long phase of decline, within the municipal markets in Milan and in other European cities digital, and social innovation projects concerning the sustainability of food supply chains, the development of shop and local delivery apps, and education and awareness-raising actions on food lifestyles are underway. However, no projects similar to FM4.0 Dashboard were found within these places that integrate all these elements.
The project Food Market 4.0 Dashboard started with an ethnographic research conducted in Milan in the So.Ge.Mi wholesale market and the municipal food markets Prealpi and Morsenchio. We met and interviewed municipal market operators, wholesalers, and NGO activists involved in recovering food for donation, logistics service providers for food chains, and developers of start-ups linked to food delivery in urban areas. The ethnographic research showed that covered markets do not have an adequate level of digitalization to monitor food flows: lack of digital infrastructure, vendors with low digital skills, etc. Finally, there are no integrated systems for tracking fruits and vegetables from the wholesale market to the covered ones. We identify covered markets as suitable neighborhood food hubs to implement Food Market 4.0 Dashboard, and we chose the Morsenchio market as the ideal context for the testing phase.
We start a co-creation and co-design phase engaging Reflow partners and the local stakeholders previously contacted to define the concept of Food Market 4.0 Dashboard. The proof-of-concept has been implemented in three different steps. The first step concerns the configuration of existing hardware tools (crates, Smart Scale and Smart Gate) to demonstrate how the system works. The second step is the design and first prototyping of a digital dashboard that connects all the hardware tools. The final step concerned the design and first prototyping of the open-source versions for the Smart Scale (Open Scale) and Smart Gate (Open Gate) systems, stimulating the openness of the solution.
The prototype has been tested two times:
- A first test was conducted in the Lab Polifactory (from September 2021 to January 2022) to verify and set up the whole system.
- A real test within the Morsenchio Municipal Covered Market (from 27th January - 4th February 2022). All the hardware elements have been temporarily installed within the Market.
There could be several ways through which Food Market 4.0 Dashboard could expand to contribute to the circular transition of the urban agri-food systems.
The first way is the scale-up of FM4.0D to other covered and open-air markets, extending and diversifying the food activities and businesses involved. In this case, FM4.0D could track and monitor foods such as meat and fish and processed foods such as bakery products and dairy products.
The development of FM4.0D on a macro scale could instead trigger a bottom-up process to align the different supply chains and unify the tracking of fruit and vegetables “from-Farm-to-Fork”. Within this process, a relevant role would belong to greengrocers who, by equipping themselves with a system like FM4.0D, could trigger a chain reaction by leveraging food wholesalers and producers to adopt smart crates as a standard. This scenario, which primarily strengthens the last mile of the supply chains involved (i.e. those closest to the end customer), would also reinforce the collaboration between FM4.0D and the food delivery services that are rapidly developing in cities, thus integrating full food tracking.
Finally, a system such as FM4.0D could collect different data that would contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics of food systems at the urban level. In this perspective, food traceability and waste prevention data could complement information on sales, delivery, and consumption by generating an urban topography of food needs. The analysis and interpolation of these data could stimulate the development of new policy initiatives dedicated to the circularity of urban agri-food systems.
Food Market 4.0 Dashboard is a solution implemented within the H2020 Reflow Milano Pilot to support the transition to a circular agri-food system by connecting and adapting the current system to how modern citizens consume and live through co-creation, co-design processes, and democratized technological advancements. In particular, Food Market 4.0 Dashboard is conceived to track and trace food flows starting from urban contexts supporting food waste reduction and prevention. The global challenge to tackle food waste has only at the beginning as reported in The Food Waste Index Report published by UN Environment Programme.
