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Smarter Food


Food Technology – A healthy appetite for innovation

Scientists believe there are 140,000 varieties of cultivated rice, but no one knows the exact number. Thailand is the world's largest exporter of rice and the U.S. is the twelfth largest. Instead of 'How are you?' a typical Chinese greeting is 'Have you had rice today?

Good grains

Rice is the main food staple of more than half the world's population. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, 20% of the total food energy intake for every man, woman, and child in the world comes from rice. So what if food technology could make rice a stronger crop that is more nutritious?


With the processing power of 167 teraflops, the World Community Grid can harness the donated and otherwise unused power from nearly one million individual PCs. Using the grid, the project can be completed in less than two years - as opposed to over 200 years using more conventional computer systems.

Chocolate: good taste is in the genes

Few things are as clear-cut as a chocolate bar. But there is a lot of science and food technology behind something so simple and sweet.




70% of the world's cocoa is grown in Africa. For every $1 of cocoa imported, between one and two dollars of domestic agricultural products are used to make chocolate products. The cocoa genome consists of about 400 million base pairs. The human genome only has 3 billion base pairs

From the FARM to FORK. Up to 50% of food is lost or wasted between field and fork.
Why smarter food in the UK - Less waste. A third of the food we buy is thrown away untouched. - Local sustainability. Half the vegetables and over 95% of the fruit consumed in the UK is imported from abroad and the UK ranks amongst the 20 least self-sufficient countries. - Smarter supply chains.  Our supply chains are inefficient. In the dairy supply chain for example, £1.5 billion is wasted annually through inefficient processes. - Safer food. Food-related ill health is costing the NHS in excess of an estimated £7 billion a year and the total number of contamination incidents increased from 421 in 2000, to 1312 in 2007.

Pet food. Lettuce. Turkey. Baby food. Milk.

These are just some of the high profile recalls we've seen recently. Consumers worldwide are asking the same questions. They wonder, is their food safe? And where did it come from?


Super market


Farm to fork



Mapping meat

Norway's largest food supplier, Nortura BA, is implementing a first-of-a-kind solution to help with food safety and supply chain optimisation. To achieve full traceability, IBM is working with Matiq (US), the IT subsidiary of Nortura. Poultry and meat products will be packaged with RFID chips to help ensure that they are kept in optimal conditions as they travel from farms to store shelves.

Interest in animal tracking is not new to the Norwegian food industry. The nation's government set a 2010 deadline for standards and policy regarding food traceability as part of its e-Traceability (eSporing) programme, intended to increase food safety through visibility from the farm to the store.