ADCATER - Advanced Digital Solutions for Professional Food and Nutrition Catering Service

ID Call: 1st ICT-AGRI-FOOD Joint Cofund Call - 2019

Funding Programme: ERA-NET Cofund ICT-AGRI-FOOD

Sapienza's role in the project: Beneficiary partner

Scientific supervisor for Sapienza: Umberto Nanni

Department: 'Antonio Ruberti' Computer, Control and Management Engineering

Project start date: May 1, 2021

Project end date: April 30, 2023

Project Abstract:

Challenge: Food waste is an eminent problem in today's economy, accounting for 20% of all food produced in the EU. Catering and food services in healthcare institutions face even greater challenges: plate waste in healthcare facilities varies between 6% and 65%; hospitalised patients continue to suffer from the risk of malnutrition resulting from inadequate food distribution and consumption. Solution: ADCATER will develop advanced ICT technologies and integrate them into a 'Smart Food Catering Supply Chain' platform that provides: economic efficiencies to growers and suppliers; customised nutritional accuracy for diners/patrons, wholesalers and caterers; and verification of personal, organisational and global nutrition policies. This will be achieved by harnessing computer vision and 'deep learning' technologies to identify and decode images of prepared food 'served on the plate before the meal' and 'left on the plate after the meal', applying advanced analysis to derive valuable information such as: ingredients of the meal served, the degree of adaptation and dietary differences to the diner's profile, batch traceability data, effective and up-to-date nutritional supervision, food waste and the correlation between consumer consumption and health.

ADCATER impact:

• Contribute to the strengthening of European research on digitisation in the agri-food system by bringing together relevant expertise from 3 different EU Member States and an AC, combining research in computer vision and data analysis and collection (Fraunhofer, BEIA, UNIROMA1), operational knowledge on food supply chain (FoodFix) and nutritional data and measurement capabilities (Hebrew University);
• Realising the potential of ICT and digital technologies to share data along the entire food value chain, implementing advanced food traceability, connecting all segments of the supply chain, and enabling all components to achieve efficiency, freshness and the right amount of food while providing accurate and precision nutrition to patients.
• Validate a new business model, combining high-level research expertise and IT SMEs active in the food market.

ADCATER project: aims to achieve a TRL 5, an integrated 'food to fork' system, which provides health workers with detailed information on actual nutrition intake and financial efficiency. The system is to be tested at the Sheba Medical Centre in Israel.

With reference to the activities of UNIROMA1 (WP4), publicly available ontologies will be identified for the food domain (e.g. FAO's AGROVOC thesaurus or the BBC's food ontology) and other non-food domains relevant to the project (e.g. healthy lifestyle ontology). The aim is to reuse available knowledge sources and data in this context (e.g. in the form of open data). This will be integrated and complemented with specific extensions in order to build THE FOOD KNOWLEDGE GRAPH of ADCATER (KG). Data from all stakeholders involved will be integrated into this knowledge graph. W3C standards will be adopted to represent and query ontologies (e.g. RDF, RDFS, OWL, SPARQL). Open access will be granted to the schema-level information provided by the KG, such as a new shared and common ontology on the food domain. Extensions of the information collected in the KG will also be publicly distributed, subject to the agreement of the stakeholders involved who originally own this data (if necessary, the data will be appropriately anonymised for this purpose). The data will be distributed as Linked Open Data to guarantee reuse with standard platforms. After the end of the project, the care and long-term preservation of the data will be the responsibility of the industrially active company FoodFix.