Chapter 1
Book overview

Food is an essential component that sustains human life. With the continual increase in the human population and the rarity of self-sustaining communities, the availability of food in sufficient quantities where and when it is needed is of paramount importance. Although there is a resurgence in growing interest to grow local food supplies and in self-reliance through initiatives such as agrihood, complete self-sustainability in terms of year-round food needs is absent in almost all circumstances. Reasons for this could include the need for variety demanded by consumers, inefficiencies, and the lack of required skills as well as the unavailability of necessary resources (e.g., water, land) that are associated with growing one's own food, and issues related to economics.

The food industry addresses this need by providing the infrastructure necessary to grow and deliver food from farm to fork (F2F) when and where it is needed. The food consumed by most people these days passes through the food industry in some form that includes processed and raw material. The food industry therefore directly helps nourish and sustain the world population. In broad terms, the highly diverse food industry comprises a complex network of actors, resources, and processes that add distinct value and facilitate the growth, transportation, retail, and consumption of food products. The food production and distribution process connects all stakeholders from producers to consumers with a global-scale food network that is highly interwoven with culture, economics, environment, politics, and science.

The food industry is associated with and responsible for every detail of food products from farm to fork. A wide variety of activities occurs in the food industry, including research and development (e.g., to develop effective means to address pests and the damage they create), agriculture (e.g., to grow crops, raise livestock), food processing (e.g., transform fresh food products to canned and packaged food products), the creation of regulations for food production and distribution that ensure safe food products, and the packaging, distribution, advertising, and marketing of food products. As our modern world evolves rapidly through environmental changes, technological innovations and population shifts, the global food network is undergoing rapid transformation as it adapts to significant challenges and opportunities.

In this book, we embrace technological innovation across the food supply chain as well as the set of perspectives that brings food products from farm to fork.Specifically, we consider RFID (radio-frequency identification) and its use in the food industry. While the extent of RFID use in the food industry in general is not as widespread as it is in the apparel and pharmaceutical industries, there is certainly an increase in interest for RFID in raw material production for use on farms as well as livestock, food-supply chains at least at the pallet level, and for inventory management as well as to address various forms of shrinkage at retail stores. We provide a basic high-level introduction to RFID in Chapter 2 to help understand its general characteristics, what it can and cannot be used for, and some challenges that are associated with RFID adoption. For the remainder of this chapter, we briefly consider some general trends that affect the food industry, some of the challenges it faces, and the need for traceability in the food industry.

1.1 General trends

We now briefly discuss a few general trends that affect the food industry -population growth and the increased interest in food quality and safety.

1.1.1 Population growth

The food industry is generally credited with the provision of relatively affordable food products at locations that are not too inconvenient to a reasonably large proportion of the world's population. While the overall amount of food produced is likely to be enough to feed the world and to eradicate hunger altogether, there are severe constraints that prevent this from realization: the supply of and demand for food products are not necessarily in close physical proximity to each other, the lack of physical infrastructure such as roads at some locations where food products are urgently needed, the perishable nature of food products, unsaleables due to damage and waste at farms and elsewhere, and ultimately economic infeasibility.

As the world population size grows, this imbalance in the ability of food industry to ensure that food product demand is satisfied with at least enough supply in terms of when and where food is needed is only likely to worsen. Most forecasts predict a steady increase in the world's population. For example, the United Nations has forecast, the world's population to increase to 9.15 billion by 2050 and generate about a 60% increased demand for food. Concomitant to this population increase are several directly or indirectly related issues such as the effects of global warming and the increase in the volume of crops that are used for bioenergy and other industrial purposes, which essentially reduces available land for food products for human consumption. According to an estimate by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2014, Chapter 7), global warming has been reducing agricultural yield by 2% per decade even as global food demand has risen by 14% per decade over the same period.Moreover, uneaten food reduces other scarce resources such as fresh water and oil.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that, each year, about 1.3 billion tons, which is about a third of the food produced in the world for human consumption, is wasted or lost in the food supply chain due to various reasons. In addition to related social and economic implications, there are clearly associated environmental impacts. In the United States, for example, about two thirds of the food waste ends up in landfills with about a quarter in terms of its weight generated as methane gas, which is a major contributor to global warming. With the projected increase in human population and the issues associated with the availability of food products when and where they're required, it is critical for the food industry to meet the food consumption needs of people worldwide so that they can have healthy and active lifestyles with access to high-quality, fresh, and nutritious food.

Clearly, with the steady increase in competition for agricultural land between products that are and that are not meant for human consumption, it is becoming necessary to adapt our ways so that more people are fed with output from less land. Moreover, there is also widespread realization that raising production levels alone will not necessarily address the issues facing the food industry because inadequate storage and distribution is the major cause of food loss in developing countries and wastage at the retail and consumer level is the major cause in affluent countries (www.sustainablefoodssummit.com, accessed October 2, 2015). The changing diets in the developing world also require appropriate responses from the food industry. There is also a need to protect existing natural resources because agriculture already consumes around 70% of all fresh water that is used and accounts for about a third of the greenhouse gas emissions while utilizing about 40% of the available land area. The challenge, therefore, is to improve sustainable food production that minimizes its environmental impact and takes into account societal preferences and needs as well as its economic impact on the overall food industry.

Despite the gloomy projections by forecasters around the world on the availability of food to sustain the population in the immediately foreseeable future, not all hope is lost yet. When we look at history, there is a strong precedent for the ability of humans to step up to the plate and do what is necessary. For example, agricultural production across the world doubled four times between 1820 and 1975 to feed a global population that increased from one billion human beings in 1800 to 6.5 billion in 2002 (Scully 2003). Given current levels of inefficiencies in the food supply chain, as evidenced by the amount of wastage, surely there are ways to improve the food supply chain efficiency and to increase the effective amount of food that is available for human consumption (Oxfam 2014). We discuss some of these issues in Chapters 5 and 8.

1.1.2 Food quality and safety

As demand for food products has increased, developments in food product technology have extensively modified the processes involved in the production and distribution of food products. The science of food production evolves in response to continual pressure from population growth, arable land shrinkage, species vulnerability, and environmental disruptions. To ensure safe and animal-friendly production, restricted pollution, and use of natural resources, governments have responded through new legislation and regulation. Examples of this include the Codex Alimentarius standards, the General Food Law (European Union 2002/178), and the EU-BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) regulations.

Since the first session, held in Rome in October 1963, the primary goals of the Codex Alimentarius Commission have been to ensure food safety and fair practices in the international food trade. Jointly administered by FAO and WHO, the commission sets standards related to food products in terms of guidelines, codes of practice and recommendations, on hygiene, food labels, food safety, and risk assessment, contaminants in food, limits on pesticide...