Smart decisions via food informatics

Digital services

With more agrifood businesses moving to process digitalisation, big data – and the potential it contains – will increase substantially. To maximally exploit this resource, combining the right data with the right skills is essential. This will optimise decisions about (food) production, storage, distribution, reformulation, purchase and consumption. Wageningen Food & Biobased Research unlocks and organises these data, and develops predictive AI models that add power and value to the decision-making process. The outcome is smart, digital components that compute, and clearly communicate, decision options and their pros and cons.

Agrifood and AI

Wageningen Food & Biobased Research is unique within the agrifood domain in digitally exploiting knowledge and data. Their data scientists combine expert science (knowledge engineering) with information extracted from data (machine learning). In order to obtain viable material they use AI methodologies, from deep learning and text mining to knowledge elicitation. Wageningen Food & Biobased Research provides software solutions using semantic web services.

These allow agrifood companies to organise and integrate data, maximizing its value. Our agile approach provides a solid foundation for the development of smart and reliable decision-making software by and for agrifood companies across the chain: apps, web applications and integrated software systems. Imagine, for example, systems for the automated generation of low-sugar recipes; or that allow fruit suppliers to compare the product quality of different farmers; or apps that help retailers and consumers purchase food products that are sustainable and healthy and safe and economically viable.

Plant-based protein database

Wageningen experts have developed an online tool that supports consumers to create personalised fibre-enriched diets. This was a collaboration with the Maag-Lever-Darm-Stichting, Ziekenhuis Gelderse Vallei and a number of food companies (2019-2020).

In another project they developed a digital reformulation tool that helps the bakery industry achieve substantial reductions in added sugar without compromising on texture and taste. Companies can efficiently create tailor-made solutions depending on their specific bakery reformulation goals. In the Trusted Source project (2017-2021, with partners from across the supply chain), Wageningen experts are developing standards for linking and sharing existing data sources and systems to increase supply chain transparency for consumers.

In the Protein Compass project (2019-2022, a collaboration with ingredient supplier DSM), Wageningen experts collect and generate systematic overviews of the characteristics of protein-rich raw materials and protein isolates. These form a database of all relevant characteristics, including the potential in the production chain and the economic viability of the most-promising plant-protein sources. The database will contain publicly available information, retrievable by smart digital technologies, and newly generated data from standardized methods, to ensure reliability when comparing data from different sources.