Food Intelligent Trading Ecosystem (FITE)

Covid-19 is significantly disrupting food supply chains across all sectors:

* stockpiling impact on food supply chains
* operational pressures due to extreme peaks (on-line supermarkets) or troughs of demand (local food markets)
* lockdown impact on food manufacturing workforce capacity
* acute cashflow challenges on food manufacturing SME sub-tiers

To prevent disruption to these important supply chains it is critical that Government and Industry bodies as well as primes / supermarket chains can visualise potential future risks and mitigate accordingly.

However, multi-tier visibility and collaboration is minimal, (especially for SMEs) mainly due to a lack of supply chain intelligence and digital technologies that simplify how companies can find each other, engage (especially during lockdown) and start trading.

This project will mitigate these immediate Covid-19 related challenges by deploying our supply chain intelligence and collaboration platform, and building on successful supply chain mapping pilots for BEIS, Made Smarter and Sheffield LEP, and supply chain clustering pilots with the MTC, West of England Aerospace Forum and North East Automotive Alliance.

FITE will combine big data analytics and machine learning with social networking and e-commerce technology to establish intelligent and collaborative ecosystems for food manufacturing in the UK.

UK citizens will experience less disruption as improved visibility will enable proactive mitigation actions.

Food manufacturing SMEs will be able to raise their profiles.

Government can view consolidated data to support food supply chain policy decisions.