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Integrating Nature, People, and Technology To Tackle the Global Agri-Food Challenge Thomas Hofmann* Chair for Food Chemistry and Molecular Sensory Science, Technische Universität München, Lise-Meitner-Straße 34, D-85354 Freising, Germany safety measures that could build consumer trust and enable disruptive innovation. The actors in the agri-food sector need to join R&D forces and leverage intellectual resources and emerging technologies from other industry sectors, in the following ways: First, home diagnostic technologies such as noninvasive sensors collecting biomarker data from skin, saliva, and urine samples, respectively, connected with mobile tools need to be advanced to empower consumers to self-monitor lifestyle and health performance and to support personalized diet profiles combined with the ability to self-quantify the impact of their diets. This will help to better align consumer's intentions and actual behavior toward healthier foods and will improve public nhanced agricultural productivity, advanced processing health. technologies, and increased consumer expectations for Second, partially unfair trading practices and disconnected affordable and readily available foods have facilitated an bilateral supplier−buyer relationships need to be replaced by enormous growth of the food sector. However, this also collaborative partnerships from the field to the consumer’s plate resulted in partially unfair trading practices and fragmented to deliver foods targeting preferences and nutritional needs of supply chains with adverse consequences for environmental individuals. Alternative materials, modularized food manufacturing, adaptive microfabrication technologies, and new delivery sustainability. Reinforced by food authenticity and contamiconcepts in combination with the advent of digital technologies nation scares, this has undermined confidence in the safety and open opportunities to customize at economies-of-scale to help transparency of the food chain. consumers better tailor their diet. Kick-starting a post-animal The agri-food system faces a great balancing act. Continuous bioeconomy and complementing alternative plant-based population growth and changes in dietary patterns, driven by resources, cellular agriculture may play a key role in producing billions of people joining the middle class in the coming years, agricultural products such as meat or fish from cell cultures and, lead experts to predict that the world will need to increase food combined with recent technologies for re-engineering each and production by ∼60% to feed 9.6 billion people by 2050.1 In every natural food flavor,3 will allow the delivery of truly parallel, ∼50% of the world’s vegetated land is already used for authentic eating experiences with positive impacts on the food production, and 33% of soils are degraded by erosion. The environment, antibiotic resistance, and food safety. Although agri-food sector accounts for 25% of global CO2 emissions and the world’s first cultured beef hamburger, engineered in 2013 consumes 70% of global freshwater extractions, but 32% of all from 20,000 muscle fibers,4 required an investment of U.S. food produced is wasted.1 Without change, we will not be able $330,000, technological advances will allow for cost reductions, to feed the world with enough quality food in the future. similar to what has been seen for direct-to-consumer genome In addition, the world faces a double burden of malnutrition: sequencing services (which have dropped from U.S. $350,000 3.5 billion people are malnourished with hunger and microin 2007 to 500 million people) are linked to a rise in water and energy, as well as virgin and recycled materials. This noncommunicable chronic diseases such as diabetes and place a will be enabled by progress in science and technology to growing burden on our healthcare systems.2 Conflicting develop highly controlled precision agro-technologies and messages on which diet is healthy are further widening the flexible on-demand production equipment making use of its gap between consumers’ best intentions for health and their inherent advantage in the decentralized manufacturing of actual behavior. customized foods. Supported by on-the-fly analytics to monitor A shortage of both systems knowledge and key entrepreneurial and managerial skills that are needed to solve such highly interlinked challenges limits the potential for smarter Received: April 18, 2017 resource management, efficiency gains, and advances in food
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© XXXX American Chemical Society
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DOI: 10.1021/acs.jafc.7b01780 J. Agric. Food Chem. XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX
Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry
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molecular changes in key food quality attributes from the field to the plate and enhanced by adaptable supply structures, such future developments will open new avenues to personalize the offerings in the food service sector and to individualize in-home processing. This, however, will not be possible without a number of technological breakthroughs, not least of which is the realization of a “digital twin” and the threads that connect it to the physical world.5 Coming with each and every physical product, this “digital twin” holds a record of the history (origin, recipes, process parameters, etc.), the sensory quality, and the nutritional state of foods and their intermediates throughout the value chain, thus creating an auditable record of the journey behind all products. This will deliver a new quality of traceability and auditability of food quality, safety, and authenticity and will lead consumers to build confidence in what they are eating. Fourth, we have to decouple the sector’s growth from the consumption of finite resources. By means of responsible innovation, the traditional “produce−consume−dispose” culture needs to be transformed into a circular bio-economy, whereby production side streams and biomass residues are injected back into the global production circuit as secondary raw materials, rather than being discarded. Transdisciplinary collaboration will deliver smart strategies integrating the cascaded disassembly of heterogeneous residues using innovative (bio/chemo)technologies, the reassembly of added value biomaterials, and their recycling into supply chains that meet the economic and environmental requirements for their production. In 2017, the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) chartered a new Knowledge and Innovation Community, named EIT Food (https://eit.europa.eu/eitcommunity/eit-food), to boost the sector transformation. EIT Food is a multistakeholder community of market-leading businesses, technology innovators, best-in-class research institutions and educators, farming organizations, and governmental and civil society organizations. This alliance bundles R&D forces of its partners to jointly tackle the challenges mentioned above to improve nutrition and global health and make the food system more resource-efficient, secure, transparent, and trusted. Following a people-centric approach, EIT Food will introduce new consumer engagement formats such as coideation events and online creation tools as well as innovative learning and advanced training methods for students, professionals, and executives to overcome “silo” thinking and provide “food system” skills, and will develop new entrepreneurial tools and business practices that empower talents at all career stages to become entrepreneurial champions in the food sector. Integrating nature, people, and technology, EIT Food is going to lead by example and become a growing alliance sharing the ambition to spearhead a global revolution in responsible food innovation and production. As Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (JAFC), I invite best-in-class scientists to play an active role in the up-coming transformation of the agri-food sector. Now, your creativity and inspiration are needed to illuminate yet unexplored raw materials, (bio)molecular tools, and nanotechnologies; to further advance cellular and precision agriculture; and to develop resource-smart bioconversion and processing technologies leveraging the innovation potential waiting at the intersection of disciplines. JAFC is proud to support by disseminating your trusted science in society!
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AUTHOR INFORMATION
Corresponding Author
*Phone: +49-8161/71-2902. Fax: +49-8161/71-2949. E-mail:
[email protected]. ORCID
Thomas Hofmann: 0000-0003-4057-7165 Notes
The author declares no competing financial interest.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank all partners for their inspiration and support in preparing and kick-starting EIT Food. I express my gratitude to the European Institute for Innovation and Technology (EIT) for its professionalism in supporting innovation.
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REFERENCES
(1) World Resources Report 2013−2014: Creating a Sustainable Food Future; World Resource Institute, 2013. http://www.wri.org/ publication/reducing-food-loss-and-waste. (2) World Health Organization. Noncommunicable Diseases Progress Monitor, 2015; http://www.who.int/nmh/publications/ ncd-progress-monitor-2015/en/. (3) Dunkel, A.; Steinhaus, M.; Kotthoff, M.; Nowak, B.; Krautwurst, D.; Schieberle, P.; Hofmann, T. Nature’s chemical signatures in human olfaction: a foodborne perspective for future biotechnology. Angew. Chem., Int. Ed. 2014, 53, 7124−7143. (4) Post, M. J. Cultured beef: medical technology to produce food. J. Sci. Food Agric. 2014, 94, 1039−1041. (5) Grieves, M. Digital Twin: Manufacturing Excellence through Virtual Factory Replication; Grieves LLC, 2014; pp1−7.
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DOI: 10.1021/acs.jafc.7b01780 J. Agric. Food Chem. XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX
