Researchers create digital twins of fruit to reduce waste

Most fruits are literally cruising for a bruising, say researchers who have created what they call “digital twins” of fruits and vegetables being shipped internationally. These models have allowed the researchers to understand that cooling conditions involved in shipping are leading to damaged fruits ending up on shelves only to be thrown away.

Each year about a third of all food is shovelled into the bin instead of our mouths — this is a costly and wasteful prospect and the ways that foods are shipped play into this problem. The researchers, from Empa, the University of Bern and Stellenbosch University, worked to develop digital models of citrus fruit as a way of understanding how shipping foods in less than ideal circumstances could lead to substantial food waste.

The digital twins of fruits are models developed using the temperature sensors that all modern shipping containers are equipped with. These sensors let the researchers keep track of the temperature levels of 47 shipping containers of citrus fruits across their entire transport route. They then took data from these trips and ran them through computer models to determine the quality of the fruits — these are the digital twins. Specifically, negative factors such as decay, moisture loss, cold damage and mould were analysed, along with positive changes like the mortality of fruit fly larvae.

The analysis showed that around half of the shipments were operating outside of ideal temperatures, meaning that the negative factors were likely to occur in the fruits. This would result in goods that were decayed, spoiled or damaged being put on store shelves and then quickly discarded; at the end of the fruits’ journey, some only had a shelf life of a few days before they were thrown away.

The solution to this problem is not merely to increase refrigeration but to change its parameters, as different foods have different requirements. For the citrus fruit, there is a balance between cooling products to a point where the desirable factors (such as keeping decay or fruit flies at bay) but preventing damage to the fruit caused by low temperatures. Other foods have their own needs and they all need to be carefully adhered to to keep the quality of the shipped produced high.

In addition to creating these digital models of fruits and vegetables, physical ones were created too. Fruit models were equipped with sensors that can measure temperature and moisture content as though on real fruits. The researchers suggest that these fruit ‘spies’ could be sneakily put into batches of shipped products to report precise data in order to optimise shipping conditions of food.

Combined, the researchers suggest that if physical and digital models of fruits and vegetables were used in the shipping industry to better understand the conditions that these foods are exposed to then waste could be reduced, with more people fed and money saved.

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