Food manufacturers and distributors are beginning to attach IoT sensors to shipping containers to track critical information about the temperature and humidity of the product plus ongoing location and shipper information. But it wasn’t long ago there was no standardization of how these devices were to communicate with one another. Today, it’s a different story, and NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) has been a prime mover in getting standardization off the ground.
Moving food safely and efficiently around the U.S. and the world requires that food supply chain partners exchange important and timely information in a usable and expedient manner. However, to make that happen requires that the community of stakeholders (including food processors, IoT sensor/device makers and operators in the food supply chain) needs to find a meaningful and feasible way of representing that data to assure it is communicated and interpreted as intended, said Nenad Ivezic, leader of the Process Engineering Group in the Systems Integration Division of the NIST Engineering Laboratory in a NIST blog post.