The food and agriculture sector faces many challenges and seemingly conflicting requirements. Despite rising costs and limited water and soil resources, food businesses must provide nutritious, safe, and affordable food to consumers with changing lifestyles and consumption patterns. They work with regulatory authorities to ensure food availability, avoidance of adulteration and contamination, and safety. These global issues concern the EU and China.
The DiTECT project developed the foundational technology for an advanced food safety monitoring system. A sophisticated, live tool manages the entire food distribution network in this system. The system can detect, assess, and reduce biological, chemical, and environmental pollutants in corn, poultry, cattle (including milk), and fish supply chains. DiTECT sought to improve EU-China agri-food chain cooperation between researchers, industries, and food authorities. DiTECT used cutting-edge computer and food science software, sensors, and data management. This allowed them to quantify hazards and contaminants, develop tools to identify unethical practices and fraud, and create a comprehensive scientific database with data from every stage of the farm-to-fork process in the pilot projects.
To efficiently identify, evaluate, and reduce biological, chemical, and environmental food hazards, the DiTECT project seeks measurable proof. The project uses advanced software and fast, non-invasive sensors. Goals of the DiTECT project: (i) To study the needs, preferences, market demand, and reception of different food industry user groups; (ii) to create product-specific food safety models for international food chains that involve multiple food business operators in the European Union (EU) and China; (iii) to facilitate collaboration between food value-chain actors and regulatory authorities; and (iv) to create a technology (v) A new framework will integrate food industry data. The DiTECT project aims to produce efficient, effective, and appealing conceptual and technical results. These findings will boost food system trust by reducing food hazards, resulting in sustainable market changes for commercial food actors. To demonstrate and verify the DiTECT approach's efficacy using specific food safety scenarios; and to expand, distribute, and communicate the project's tools and findings to improve the EU and China's food systems. Establishing a technologically advanced food safety monitoring platform will achieve the goals. The DiTECT project covers maize, poultry, cattle (including milk), and fish production use-cases. The iFSMS platform was tested and validated in these scenarios. The project successfully brought together EU and Chinese researchers, industries, and food authorities within the agri-food chain.
