Project
Call for Partners: Resilient Fresh Value Chain
Fresh fruits and vegetables fit in a diverse diet and must be fresh, tasty and nutritious at the moment of consumption. Society, and horticultural actors in particular, can benefit from reduction in food waste and loss and from a better quality of products when they reach the consumer. This can be achieved by an improved integration of quality management along the total fresh value chain, and should involve all its actors, from breeders to supermarkets and other sales points.
Sensors, data management tools, and intelligent algorithms can enhance fresh value chain management by acquiring and translating data from cultivation to retail into actionable information. It's crucial that algorithms capture both pre- and post-harvest phases (i.e.; from cultivation to storage and logistics) to ensure product quality at the consumer level.
The project objective is to design an organisational framework for quality assurance over the total value chain for fresh products. Additionally, we will develop and test data tools, in particular algorithms and sensory systems that link pre- and post-harvest product quality.
Ultimately, we aim to minimise food loss and waste throughout the supply chain, ensuring that fresh products reaching consumers meet quality standards and have the desired shelf life.
User cases (Tomatoes, Cucumbers, Melons)
The project will apply the knowledge on coupling pre- and postharvest quality by four user cases:
- Mitigate the quality issues of tomatoes due to full LED cultivation and the use of increasingly more resistant ToBRFV cultivars.
- Create better performing cucumber genotypes that can last longer in terms or weight loss and do not suffer from the lack of snap.
- Predicting and steering quality of melons by predicting ripeness using non-destructive tools.
- Early detection of mycosphaerella in cucumber, both pre- and postharvest.
Invitation to collaborate
We invite Dutch horticulture fresh value chain companies to participate in this project. Breeder, growers, traders, logistics, retail, consumers, processors, data platform suppliers, and tech companies in the fields of sensors and computer vision are welcome.
