Food for Well-being

October 3, 2022

The Innovation Center's Narrative "Food for Well-being"

 

After narrowing down the issues to focus on for the business plan, food was chosen as the first theme, and the Innovation Center created a narrative around the theme of "Food for Well-being". We chose food as the theme because we believe that Yokogawa's "past," "present," and "future" technologies can be applied to food. The Innovation Center examined what Yokogawa could contribute to the realization of wellbeing in the field of food, and developed a narrative called "Food for Well-being" to describe the future that Yokogawa is aiming for.

What we mean by "up to now" is the accumulation of technologies and contributions that Yokogawa has made through its "power to measure" and "power to connect". In the food industry, in particular, we have continued to contribute to our customers by not only providing the value of "keeping customers running" by supporting the operation of plants in continuous operation with highly reliable and high-quality control technology, but also by offering proposals for optimizing the value chain, from quality control of raw materials to the establishment of supply chains.

”Now" refers to the challenge of contributing to new customers by applying these technologies we have cultivated to new markets and fields. As an example, we believe that the measurement, control, and information technologies that Yokogawa has cultivated in a wide range of industries can be applied to the establishment of mass production processes and quality assurance and control in food plants. In the field of cellular agriculture, which is attracting attention as one solution to the food crisis, Yokogawa also believes that it can provide new value by applying the biosensing technology it has cultivated in the life science field to advanced meat culture technology and other applications.

The vision of "the future" is a Food-Autonomy society, based on the assumption that the food value chain will be reversed, looking not only at industry but also at the individual. In addition to the application of measurement, control, and information technologies to the food domain, in which Yokogawa will play an active role as an integrator of co-creation. Yokogawa envisioned and drew a future vision of the food value chain and believed that the flow from production to distribution and consumption would change to distribution and production with consumption as the starting point. This is exactly the opposite of the conventional value chain, in which each consumer's food preferences and consumption behavior are collected as data, which is then used to determine how production should be conducted. Beyond that, there is the vision of a Food-Autonomy society, a society that adapts to the health and happiness of each individual, and where each individual is well-being and sustainable, without overproduction, underproduction, or wasteful transportation. However, this cannot be achieved by an individual organization, but requires co-creation through social connections. In this co-creation, Yokogawa will play the role of an integrator, contributing to the realization of a Food-Autonomy society through the construction of a "system of systems (SoS)," for example, by linking independent systems to achieve what is impossible with a single system.

 

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Research Themes

◇AI technology to agriculture
Applying AI technology to agriculture will help address global warming and realize a stable supply of food.
We will contribute to the stable supply of food by providing cultivation recipes suitable for artificial light-type plant factories and solar-type plant factories through AI technology. 

◇Marine Ranching System
We aim to increase the production of fishery resources in the world as a whole by utilizing the large amount of nutrient resources that lie dormant in the deep offshore areas.
We aim to expand and stabilize production of fishery resources by building a new ecosystem in offshore areas where biological productivity is extremely low. Specifically, we will pump up nutrient-rich deep ocean water in a way that maximizes the use of natural energy and efficiently irradiate it with sunlight to generate phytoplankton. This is then used as a starting point to efficiently produce zooplankton, small fish, and large fish through the food chain, thereby ensuring the stable production of the desired marine products.

◇Dairy cow monitoring system
The body condition score of dairy cows is automatically determined on behalf of the dairy farmer.
Body condition score is a numerical value of the fleshing and eating condition of dairy cows and is used to determine the condition of dairy cows. The body condition score is quantified by dairy farmers based on the appearance of dairy cows, such as body shape and stomach fullness, which requires a lot of skill and cannot be managed as data. To solve these problems, we are developing a system that outputs body condition scores from images of dairy cows based on deep learning of the dairy farmer's quantifiable senses.

 

Link

・“What's next for our planet?”
https://www.yokogawa.com/special/planet/stories/scenario_for_the_future_that_open_the_door_to_well-being_in_the_food_field/

・Yokogawa's vision of future scenarios - Future scenarios in 2035 - A journey through time
https://www.yokogawa.com/library/resources/white-papers/future-scenario-2035-a-journey-through-time/