We've all had some food in our kitchen go bad at some point. This problem is faced on a large scale at 
food source, transit, storage and retail stores. The reason? Food has physical and chemical properties 
which are sensitive to the environment. Add a complex supply chain and you can see why so much food gets 
wasted. This is a major global concern. One solution to this is to monitor and predict food quality in 
real time. By observing physical and chemical degradation patterns unique to a food item, we can tell 
whether it's good and for how long it'll keep. But it's not practical to have humans do this all the time. 
So here's where some of the work being done by scientists at TCS Research comes in. They use digital twin 
technology to replicate these degradation patterns, which then acts as a soft sensor to virtually assess 
the quality of real food. Our research involves synchronized monitoring of time series, sensory data, 
variation and chemical composition and images, and these quantitative variations in food over time are 
recorded and AIML as well as physics based models are trained on these data to predict quality and 
therefore allowing us judicious use of food and therefore limiting wastage. Also, based on our experience in 
developing digital twins of fruits and vegetables, we are now working on a generic meta. Model that can 
actually apply to a variety of foods based on their similarity of degradation pattern and eventually we 
will cover a variety of foods like cereals, dairy, fish and meat. This emerging technology has the 
potential for solutions across the supply chain. For example, by predicting the shelf life of food items, 
retailers can sell stock in time, make better pricing decisions and even repurpose food. Farmers can 
decide on the ideal harvest time to maximize profit and you and I can make sure those fruits. In that 
bowl, stay fresh longer. This leads to the reduction of food wastage at each step. It is surprising that 
something as fundamental to human life as food still depends on centuries old technology. This can change 
dramatically using physics based rules and food chemistry and we are excited to be doing such work. The 
four digital twin can impact many industries and contribute to a sustainable future for the entire world.