Japanese Companies Use AI in Food Waste Management
- Admin
- Nov 18, 2019
- 2 min read
Nov. 17, 2019
Starting from October, Japanese companies are battling food waste in production with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
Blue Yonder founder and chief scientist Michael Feindt said, “Retailers know they must take serious action; using AI and ML across their supply chains provides a tangible way for them to cut food waste. Enabling grocery retailers to make more intelligent, data-driven, decisions, can put them on the road to significant environmental and financial savings.”
According to the Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture report, it is said that businesses were responsible for 55% of the 6.43 million tons of food that went to waste in Japan during fiscal 2016, and makers of processed foods alone accounted for nearly 40%, greatly exceeding retailers and restaurants. Therefore, Japan's government hopes to control business-related food waste by over 20% between fiscal 2016 and fiscal 2030. By using AI and ML, Japanese food companies are expected to facilitate their food waste management.
Benefits of using AI and ML
1. Improve demand forecasting: giving retailers a clear and accurate way of taking into account factors like the weather, the day of the week or time of the year to reduce the environmental impact of waste.
2. Improve availability and minimize wastage: making stock ordering easier and improving shelf presentation.
3. Set the right price: AI can automatically set prices, amount of goods left and expiry date which helps boosting profits and making sure products sell.
Starting from October, more Japanese food companies have engaged in reducing food loss. Nichirei Foods has developed an AI-powered system for detecting hard-to-remove bones in chicken meat at its plants starting this fiscal year. The old system, which uses X-rays, sometimes gives false positives, causing the meat to be thrown out. Nichirei Foods hopes to slash food waste from chicken processing by 80% in three years. Snack maker Calbee extends the shelf life of most of its potato chips to six months from four. It also will begin stamping products with "best-by" months instead of specific dates, in order to reduce the staffing needed for quality control.
In the future, there will be more companies that apply the technology of AI in tackling food waste. Using AI, food companies will be smarter to detect the quality, analyze the wasted food, and forecast the demand.
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