SMARTBUFFET:A software platform for real-time food monitoring in the context of a mid-sized restaurant.
Monitoring system; IoT; Waste of food; restaurant; Sensors; Arduino.
The food and restaurant sector are segments that are facing challenges to adapt to a new reality that requires less food waste, quality food and efficient management. Consumers in rich countries are estimated to waste around 222 million tonnes of food products and most of them are from restaurants. In Brazil, ANVISA requires restaurants to be monitored by nutritionists, one of whose tasks is to control the temperature of food preservation to verify compliance with its resolutions. In order for restaurants to avoid both food waste and working within these regulatory standards, efficient management is needed to optimize internal processes and make more accurate decisions. Therefore, the objective of this work is to create a smart platform for monitoring the quantity and temperature of a self-service restaurant buffet in order to minimize food waste, improve the handling of nutritional information and optimize its management. The system will be able to check the temperature consumption of food exposed in tanks of a buffet and that the data will be sent to restaurant sectors like cooking, nutrition and management in real time. The system will be created using the concepts and features of the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data and Web Programming in JavaScript. Finally, software like Node-red, ThingSpeak, Arduino IDE among other tools will compose the framework of technologies used to develop this platform.