FMCG, Pandemic and IoT NOW

The COVID-19 pandemic hit hard on global health and the economy. While some businesses were completely shut down, others continued to operate under strict government restrictions. As a result, one of the most important industries i.e: the food industry has changed forever.

Before the pandemic hit us the food manufacturing sector was producing crisps and confectioneries, beverages and convenience foods, and pretty much every edible, differently. The work included processing raw fruits, vegetables, meats and dairy products and delivering them to wholesalers, households, restaurants and different food services. Thanks to the technology, food manufacturing processes have been automated already. For example, products are often synthesized now and equipment is used to create everything from ready-to-eat meals to frozen dinners designed to be reheated in the microwave.?

The food and beverages manufacturing industry has suffered greatly due to COVID-19 as consumption has significantly reduced. At-home consumption is increasing while out-of-home consumption has literally halved. This created a huge gap in the market. It is not like people are not eating, but the supply chain has disrupted. For instance, Starbucks has shut half of its nearly 2,000 outlets in China. But at the same time, consumers are ordering food online.?In this situation, IoT has come forward providing a solution to bridge this gap.

Role of IoT in Food/ Beverages Manufacturing Industry

During the pandemic, technological solutions have been critical to keeping the economy functioning. This is why IoT is expected to have some long-lasting impact beyond COVID-19. This is how IoT is helping:

• Monitoring Cleaning in Restaurants: Easy-to-deploy IoT-enabled devices can be used by restaurants to monitor cleaning. This will include monitoring sanitizer solution concentrations, employee handwashing stations, customer cleanliness, and more, to ensure that constant compliance with cleanliness standards is being made.?
• Assisting in Supply Chain: IoT devices such as asset trackers can collect crucial data such as measuring food temperature, moisture, and orientation, at all times. This helps in keeping food inventory in the ideal setting.
• Building Brand based on Total Transparency: Consumers are becoming more sensitive about what they eat. To showcase total food transparency and traceability, businesses can now audit the processes and ensure quality. Thanks to IoT, trace and track solutions are available and consumers can actually use this to build consumer confidence in their brand.

The Perth (Australia) branch of Domino’s, our favorite pizza chain, has already embraced IoT to enhance its management processes and monitor the food safety of its products. Right now, they are using devices to automatically record and display temperature levels of the store’s food refrigeration, production, and exhaust systems. This allows employees to view every condition from live dashboards.

• Temperature Monitoring: The real time device automatically logs temperatures of food in coolers, and notifies staff if the scale goes out of range.
• Food Quality: The food quality is monitored according to sustainability standards set by the government due to COVID-19.?

In the future, this system aims to integrate a patented algorithm to optimize and manage the entire food process up until delivery so as to fully automate and streamline the kitchen flow. This will allow Domino's to become one of the fastest and quickest service restaurants.

You can read more about it here.

How is the situation working out in Indonesia?

With 3.51% of the total world population in it, Indonesia is working hard to make food production and food security more efficient. 56.64% of Indonesia is urban and the food manufacturing industry here is suffering due to the impact of the pandemic.?

Let’s zoom further into the problem: Look, for our economy to grow, we need to start living together and be able to visit public and commercial areas. For this purpose, we need to be able to increase public trust and safety.

A recent paper 'Future Smart Connected Communities to Fight COVID-19 Outbreak' by Ali Saman Tosun and Maanak Gupta, has shed interesting light on how we can utilize IoT to live together during COVID times. Smart connected devices can play a crucial role in not only mitigation and prevention of COVID spread but also help with reinforcing health guidelines and rules.?

Right now, IoT is not being utilized to overcome the issues. Our IoT industry is expected to reach IDR 1,620 trillion by 2025 and we can actually achieve a lot using real-time data-driven insights.?

As mentioned in the prior section, IoT is great for assisting in supply chain management, constantly monitoring cleanliness, and optimizing food manufacturing processes. But that is not all, Indonesia has much more use of IoT. Here’s what we can achieve.

• Intelligent Indoor Air Quality Monitoring: as we can see trend for people ordering food or daily needs over mobile apps such Gojek, Grab, Happyfresh, etc. It's telling us that consumer behavior that currently shifted. lesser people will visit physical store during pandemic which decrease selling due of safety concern. To increase public trust while visiting physical store there is by implementing Air Quality Monitoring. Some of research like MDPI told us that PM2.5 can be used to predict COVID-19 incident, and maybe in future there are sensor which able to detect COVID-19 virus in the air.
• Traffic Management System: Jakarta ranks as the 10th most congested city in the world! So obviously we are often facing traffic issues when travelling to cafes or restaurants. IoT devices can be used to build connected roadways and mitigate traffic congestion. Video Surveillance cameras can also be deployed to help with public security and increasing trust.
• Smart Connected Farms: The agriculture industry makes up to 38.95% of our country. So during these testing times, we need to focus on enabling connected farms. The idea is to embed IoT systems via ubiquitous connectivity from satellites. Satellite communications sound like a long shot but our country heavily relies on agriculture and if we can do this, we'd be maximizing productivity, quality, and optimizing costs all at the same time!

IoT is a powerful tool to improve the efficiency of the food manufacturing industry and monitor food safety very closely. For Indonesia to overcome not only its food manufacturing industry issue but also overall economic gaps, it is crucial to turn towards IoT NOW. To fight this pandemic, we need a variety of IoT solutions to deliver value to its users. The COVID-19 pandemic has been a huge problem but thanks to IoT, food manufacturers can actually use live data collection to reduce the risks of foodborne illness outbreaks.