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Chain Gang: New Tech Links Trucks on Open Road
Just as in cycling, a pack of trucks traveling tightly together increases efficiencies. Now, computers are helping big rigs gang up on the road.
GoGo Chickens: Watch Them Grow from Egg to Dinner
With facial recognition technology now being used to identify animals, knowing the full provenance of your supper — down to the coop — may be just a click away.
Recipe Tracker: Cooking Out of the Box
We look at recipe development through the eyes of several chefs, all of whom have different agendas: to eliminate waste, to use discarded ingredients and to create something unique with unexpected combinations. The common thread? Experience and creativity.
Smarter TV Dinners: Getting Under the Hood of Today’s Takeout
Just five years ago, home delivery was largely the realm of the pizzeria. But today, consumers can dine on menu items from almost any restaurant at home, thanks to independent apps that function as mini-logistics platforms. Kristin Phillips looks behind the scenes of the way we eat now.
Handoffs: Bills of Lading and the Cargo Custody Relay
Blockchain is the newest way to track and trace our food as it moves through the supply chain to our plates. But the practice of tracking food shipments isn’t new. It has long been a way for shippers to make sure their cargo is safe and secure throughout its voyage.
Route Optimization That Allows for Constant Change
An MIT student team took a challenge from their professor and created a route optimization app that takes driver input and experience into account. Their company is shaking up the logistics industry.
The Evolution of How We Shop for Food
There was a time, not long ago, when we all just went to the grocery store, filled our shopping carts, then drove home. But times are changing fast — today, we’re outsourcing shopping of all kinds, instead relying on a complex network of shoppers and shippers to bring us our goods within a week, a day or even an hour. Larissa Zimberoff explores these shipping journeys.
Will Trucks Ever Vanish? The Future of Transportation
While trains, trucks and ships continue the global movement of our food, the evolution of that last mile to our front door is vaulting forward. Here are a few innovations that might become old hat within the next few years.
On Our Loading Dock: Food System Resources
Check out these recent books, films, podcasts and other media that are making our brains buzz.
The Bullwhip and the Beer Game
Learn how little ripples become monstrous mountains in this classic supply chain lesson.
Food Movers: Rolling Refrigerators
We wouldn’t have eggs, fresh fruit, exotic fish or almost anything you find in a chilly area of the grocery store without reefers, a crucial link in today’s international food chain.
Food Movers: Can I Get That To Go?
Takeout containers have evolved way beyond paper pails and foil swans. As food delivery has become the new normal, restaurant food packaging faces tougher demands than ever before.
Food Movers: Bots in the Cold Chain
Unlike humans, bots can’t get freezer burn. That makes them especially suited to work in parts of the cold chain, where heavy lifting and freezing temps are standard.
Investing in Tomorrow’s Food Chain: Walter Robb Moves Forward
Walter Robb is best known as Whole Foods Market’s former co-CEO, where he helped usher in new ways of thinking about food, from farm to grocery cart. Now, after 40 years in the grocery business, he’s starting a new chapter. Leveraging his deep knowledge about the complexity of the food chain to advise and invest in innovative food system startups, Robb talked to Jane Black about how he is helping to cultivate the next generation of food revolutionaries.
Transcending Seasons: Following the Global Cold Chain
As refrigerated transportation became the norm a century ago, the cold chain was born. Defying seasons, cold chains offer consumers access to meats, fruits and vegetables year-round. More complex than a simple food chain, cold chains require refrigeration every step of the way because spoilage is ongoing — one missed link can ruin an entire shipment. Refrigeration expert Jonathan Rees explains why today’s cold chain is actually a cold web that crisscrosses the whole world.
Make Way for Public Markets?
Why don’t more urban centers feature public markets? To answer that question, we have to understand the history of public markets and our relationship to food.
The Pan in Choripàn
Ask any Argentinian if any other bread would be worthy of their chorizo, and you’ll get a grimace and denial all in one motion.
Ernesto’s Choripán Stand
The smell of sausage and spices fills the small space inside the stand, making it nearly impossible to suppress the desire for a bite of the grilled chorizo.
Can Food Be Too Local?
Killing your own meat isn’t quite like making your own cheese, drying your own jerky or fermenting your own beer.
Baker’s Holiday
January is just about the worst time to meet the owner of a bakery in Buenos Aires, or any business owner, for that matter. So Robyn was lucky to find to find a few minutes when Marcelo could show her around his small shop before he headed to the beach with his family.
Don’t Cry for Me…
A visit with the people behind the machine-heavy links in our food system can reveal much more than how the sausage gets made.
Curious About the Curiosities
In 1859, The Curiosities of Food was published in London by Peter Lund Simmonds in a quest to understand food at home and abroad.
Transporting Food Over Oceans
The use of ships to transport food begins at least with Viking and Roman ships that transported oil and wine over the ocean.
Food Preservation: It’s in the Can
Whether boxes, bags, or cans, food needs some sort of protection from the environment, and cans tell a story of multiple technologies, not all of which came together at the same time.
No Lunch Pass
Not a day goes by when we aren’t told how Big Food conspires to make us fat while exploiting our environment. Is this really the end of our debate about the state of our food system? Tyler Cowen’s book, An Economist Gets Lunch (2012), offers an alternative view, one...
What’s in a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich? Far More Than You’d Think
A PB&J is an exquisite example of how a simple snack belies a global network of humans and technology that operates with mystifying accuracy to deliver our food every day.
Feeding Smart Cities
With more and more talk about tech-powered smart cities, what are we doing to ensure innovative food logistics are part of the conversation?
The Return of Home Economics
Long before STEM initiatives came about, home economics programs may have done more than we know to bridge the gender gap in science.
An Art Tour of Food Logistics
If you want a new experience while visiting an art museum, try going as a food logistics nerd. Watch the docents and visitor services personnel freeze for a moment as they try to comprehend your request for guidance on finding all the art in the museum that represents different aspects of the food supply chain and food logistics.
The Meat Business, Inside and Outside Ft. Worth
The Kimball Art Museum portrays a side of the meat business many visitors to Forth Worth, Texas, don’t see. If you only toured the Stockyards outside the Museum, you’d miss the preceding centuries of carnivorous history.