It's all about food

A hackathon to find fixes from field to fork

Interns from across our IBM UK sites devised solutions to improve the worldwide food chain in a cross-lab hackathon.

The one-day event saw 70 university placement students research, design, and prototype solutions for "Feeding the future," in the face of increasing need, climate and logistical challenges, and a growing desire to reuse and recycle.

The clever ideas used IBM technologies and services to solve challenges “from field-to-fork” all along the supply chain: for growers, buyers, logistics, distribution, supermarkets, restaurants, cooperatives, and consumers in stores and at home.

They considered how the chain is affected by weather events, crop choices, transport availability, proximity to market, legislation, community preferences, the perishability of goods, international languages, and consumer motivation.

Talk to the two winning teams about their experience, and see their proposals:

"Crate Condition" proposes instrumentation of crates, pallets, and boxes of goods in transit to furnish data for an AI-based reassessment of sell-by and use-by dates - exploiting IBM technology for IoT and machine learning, IBM services for big data, and potential business partner and third parties for instrumentation.
"Water you doing?" is an idea to get information to farmers about rainfall in their area to help them grow the best crops, and look at where the most water fall is in the surrounding area with Weather Company data and easy-to-understand “heat maps” for display.

It's all about food

Address

Links