A study on IoT application in the Food Industry using Keywords Analysis

The Internet of Things is an interconnected system of computing devices, both mechanical and digital, that uses sensors applied to machines, animals and people to create unprecedented amounts of important and detailed data about systems in order to improve them. From a supply chain management perspective, the Internet of Things can enable machines to undertake the decision making process with little or no human intervention through autonomous coordination between "things" as they are transported between different entities in the supply chain. In particular, the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) enables visualization of supply chain operational processes, information gathering, and control of business development in real time. As far as the food industry is concerned, IoT helps to maintain safety standards, limit food waste, manage unpredictable variations, track and monitor the quality of foodstuffs. The solutions proposed by IoT are expected to not only influence the way food is produced, but also to assess social, environmental, and economic concerns. For this reason, IoT systems applied to the food industry are widely investigated in the extant literature. This article aims to identify and organize the main research topics regarding the development of IoT systems in the food sector, through a keyword analysis. The methodology adopted allows to identify the concepts that persist over time, those that emerge with high frequency and those that, instead, have disappeared over the years. The results allow us to make predictions about topics of future interest to researchers, outlining avenues for promising research.