The global food system continues to innovate in response to new challenges and opportunities to supply wholesome, nutritious foods to diverse consumers around the world. Innovations across the value chain, from plant breeding to product development and distribution, deliver continuous improvements and efficiencies. These innovations enable the food system to respond to changing demands at ever-accelerating rates. Our collective ability to apply these innovative solutions are a direct result of our ability to find, interpret, and communicate information much more rapidly than ever before.
This issue of Cereal Foods World (CFW) explores food production and processing innovations from farm to fork. A major theme of this issue is how information sharing enables researchers in the academic community and food industry to more quickly predict outcomes and proactively address challenges along the value chain. We delve into how powerful new technologies, like artificial intelligence, precision agriculture, and blockchain, are being applied in the food industry.
In the first Feature article, John Mendesh and Peter Erickson share the story of Partners in Food Solutions (PFS), a nonprofit organization that bolsters food innovators in Africa through technology transfer. PFS addresses food security, improved nutrition, and economic development across Africa by expanding and increasing the competitiveness of the food processing sector. It links corporate volunteers from a consortium of world-class food companies to share their expertise with promising entrepreneurs in Africa.
Five years ago, the idea of using artificial intelligence in food product development seemed like a futuristic fantasy. In their article, Hamed Faridi, Richard Goodwin, Robin Lougee, and James Martin, as part of a collaboration between McCormick & Company and IBM Research, demonstrate that the future is here. They describe how artificial intelligence is providing better insights, answering questions through data mining, and enabling new products to reach the market more quickly and efficiently.
Robert Henry looks at crops as the basic ingredients for food processors and explores new plant breeding technologies that can be used to produce desired characteristics from the grain itself instead of through processing. Pichmony Ek and Girish Ganjyal provide a hands-on reference for how to apply innovations in processing technologies to new ingredients, such as waxy wheat and quinoa, used in extruded products.
The use of digital agriculture technologies, like satellites, drones, and GPS devices on tractors, has profound implications for sustainability and crop economics. In their Issues & Trends article, Haiying Tao and David Bullock discuss how collecting data throughout a crop’s growth cycle can enable more precise applications of nitrogen, saving farmers money and improving wheat yields.
From the lab to the marketplace, we see examples of innovation. Byung-Kee Baik offers a practical approach to producing whole wheat bread with improved processing quality and consumer acceptance. Jeff Bellairs discusses how food companies are using innovation incubators and accelerators to commercialize products in more nimble and responsive ways. Finally, Lin Carson looks at blockchain solutions and how they can be applied in scientific publishing. The concept of open source information sharing through the creation of digital transaction records can dramatically accelerate information sharing among scientists.
Every article in this issue includes an element of sharing information. Through mining large data sets, we can manage crops, bring new products to market more quickly, address food insecurity, and accelerate the distribution of scientific knowledge. This issue might be viewed as a metaphor for CFW’s purpose: “to proactively share knowledge and wisdom among the cereals and grains community.”
