Internet of Things in food safety: Literature review and a bibliometric analysis

Background: Internet of Things (IoT) is growing exponentially and can become an enormous source of information. IoT has provided new opportunities in different domains but also challenges are apparent that must be addressed. Little attention has been paid to the potential use of IoT in the food safety domain and therefore the aim of this study was to fill this gap. Scope and approach: This paper reviews the use of IoT technology in food safety. A literature review was conducted using academic documents written in English language and published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. The relevant articles were analysed using the bibliometric networks to investigate the relationships between authors, countries, and content. Key findings and conclusions: IoT in food safety is a relatively new approach; the first article appeared in 2011 and has increased since then. Majority of these studies were performed by Chinese universities and the main IoT applications reported were on food supply chains to trace food products, followed by monitoring of food safety and quality. The vast majority of publications were related to food, meat, cold chain products and agricultural products. These studies used sensors to monitor mainly temperature, humidity, and location. The most frequently used communication technologies were Internet, radio frequency identifications (RFID) and wireless sensor networks (WSN). This article identifies knowledge gaps to inform the community, industry, government authorities about research directions for IoT in food safety.