| Timeline | From December 2024 to 31 December 2025 |
|---|---|
| Theme | Resource security |
| Funded by | NWO |
REAL-TIME TRACKING OF FOOD FLOWS USING THE INTERNET OF THINGS TECHNOLOGIES AND GEOSPATIAL DATA
Our project
Food today is often produced thousands of kilometres away from where it is consumed, making it challenging to track the farm of origin and routes. Current norms in science use country origins and national aggregates, oversimplifying the environmental impacts that can vary 50-fold across farms.
The Smart Avocado project is experimenting with a monitoring system to track avocados, an imported, water-hungry product, using the latest Internet-of-Things technologies. The Smart Avocados are GPS-equipped avocado replicas deployed in real avocado production sites in South Africa. By transmitting their exact geolocation, the trackers allow tracing the journey of the fruit, from the production site to the packhouse, from country roads to the cargo ship, and finally to the local reseller in the Netherlands. This creates a high-resolution map of food flow, enabling our understanding of the environmental impact of the avocado trade.
The Smart Avocado project aims to pave the way for improved monitoring methods of food flows. Through enabling the monitoring of the origin and the trajectory, we can ultimately improve our understanding of the environmental impact of imported food (such as water use and CO2 emissions). Our vision is to encourage sustainable consumer behaviours and business models to govern sustainable food trade.
Presentation video
You found a Smart avocado?
Involving stakeholders
The journey of the avocado impacts a wide range of stakeholders, from producers and exporters working toward greater sustainability to consumers, governmental organisations, NGOs, and consumer associations advocating for increased transparency and fair prices. To foster collaboration and shared understanding, the Smart Avocado Team hosted a stakeholder engagement meeting on January 15th, 2025. The event brought together over 30 participants from South Africa and Europe who have stakes in the avocado food flows, to inform them about the project, gather insights for future collaboration, and address their needs and feedback.
Watch the recording of the meeting here
Our partners
Smart Avocado is an NWO-funded project. We are partnering for this research with the University of Limpopo and the local community and supply chain actor, Westfalia Fruit.
The team
Contact persons
