This issue of Sight and Life magazine brings together diverse perspectives on the potential applications for technological innovation across the food value chain, and how that data can be harnessed to improve nutrition.
Leveraging Disruptive Technologies for the Mid-Day Meal Program in India is one example of how public and private sectors can work together to improve nutrition. The Akshaya Patra Foundation (TAPF) supports the Government of India's Mid-Day Meal (MDM) Initiative to serve nutritious meals to over 1.76 million children, and is the largest NGO-run school meal programme. TAPF partnered with Accenture to pilot a programme to see whether efficiency across the supply chain could be improved. The assessment found that efficiency could be increased by up to 20%, so they applied artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things (IoT) and blockchain to four areas of TAPF's operations: 1. monitoring meal production; 2. tracking food delivery; 3. collecting school feedback; and 4. measuring the quantity of food and supplies to be purchased.
There is something for anyone interested in data and nutrition, including articles that address the complexity of public private partnerships in innovation research, the ethics of data collection for nutrition and options to best show and share data, among many others.