Food Informatics—Review of the Current State-of-the-Art, Revised Definition, and Classification into the Research Landscape

Abstract

Background: The increasing population of humans, changing food consumption behavior, as well as the recent developments in the awareness for food sustainability, lead to new challenges for the production of food. Advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, including Machine Learning and data analytics, might help to account for these challenges. Scope and Approach: Several research perspectives, among them Precision Agriculture, Industrial IoT, Internet of Food, or Smart Health, already provide new opportunities through digitalization. In this paper, we review the current state-of-the-art of the mentioned concepts. An additional concept is Food Informatics, which so far is mostly recognized as a mainly data-driven approach to support the production of food. In this review paper, we propose and discuss a new perspective for the concept of Food Informatics as a supportive discipline that subsumes the incorporation of information technology, mainly IoT and AI, in order to support the variety of aspects tangent to the food production process and delineate it from other, existing research streams in the domain. Key Findings and Conclusions: Many different concepts related to the digitalization in food science overlap. Further, Food Informatics is vaguely defined. In this paper, we provide a clear definition of Food Informatics and delineate it from related concepts. We corroborate our new perspective on Food Informatics by presenting several case studies about how it can support the food production as well as the intermediate steps until its consumption, and further describe its integration with related concepts.