Every day a large number of food products remain unsold, especially in the large-scale retail sector. Surplus products are items near their sell-by date that can be distributed to people in need. Yet most of them, unfortunately, are still destroyed due to inefficiencies in the way the system for collecting them is organised.

The SIVEQ team (SIVEQ stands for Sistema Integrato di Valorizzazione delle Eccedenze alimentari nel Quartiere, Integrated System for the Distribution of Surplus Food Products in the Neighbourhood) set out from this paradoxical coexistence of poverty and wastage to develop methods and technologies for efficiently organising how surplus food items are redistributed to local charitable organisations, who in turn redistribute them to people in need.

The project stems from an analysis of the situation in Milan’s Municipal District 9, with its highly varied social fabric. 233 locally active non-profit and charity organisations have been mapped, with a view to involving the greatest possible number of them in the future.

The objective is to use emerging technologies for collecting (5G, NB-IoT) and processing (Big Data Analytics) data regarding food surpluses in supermarkets and to develop a collection process which reduces wastage to a minimum. The ultimate goal of the project is to create a software and hardware platform for optimising the process of recovering food surpluses that is cost-effective, repeatable and adaptable to a wide range of different contexts.

How has the platform been designed? SIVEQ collects information on the quantity and state of items and how close they are to their expiry date using scanners. The information is read directly from the packaging using the GS1-DataBar barcode standard, which makes it possible to keep track of additional information for each product, such as the expiry or sell-by date. Photographs can be taken to verify the state of the packaging. The software installed on the devices provided to staff automatically uploads the information to the web. In the cloud, the data from the various retail outlets are collected and analysed with a view to optimally meeting the food requirements entered by the beneficiary organisations. Based on the information gathered, it will be possible to pinpoint problems such as gaps in coverage and to establish new logistical links. Via a web or app interface, organisations will be able to view the status of the surplus food items allocated to them in real time and prepare to take delivery of them, transform them and if necessary supplement them with purchases.

The SIVEQ project was one of the winners of the 2017 Polisocial Award, the theme of which was the valorisation of peri-urban areas. The project’s scientific coordinator is Maurizio Magarini from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering (DEIB), while the project manager is Giulia Bartezzaghi from the Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering (DIG), with the collaboration of Giacomo Verticale, Davide Scazzoli and Atul Kumar from the DEIB, and Marco Melacini from the DIG.
The project’s partners are Coop Lombardia and Assolombarda.