Sensor4Food (S4F) accelerates the digital transformation of Europe’s largest meat category—poultry. The industry produces ~14.4 Mt annually, feeds ~300 million consumers, and provides millions of jobs directly and indirectly. Today, critical control points (mycotoxins, pathogens/antibiotics, welfare-in-transit and rearing, meat defects, side-streams, traceability) are slow, lab-bound, and fragmented. S4F will integrate advanced photonic sensing with multimodal, edge-to-cloud AI and validate the stack end-to-end in industrial pilots spanning feed reception to processing and valorisation.
S4F matures five complementary photonic techniques (MIR for mycotoxins, MIR for process analytics, silicon-photonics biosensing for pathogens, VIS–NIR–SWIR hyperspectral imaging, and RF+ultrasound for myopathies) to TRL 7, linking them with non-optical signals, and deploying a standards-ready traceability layer (pilot for “poultry passport”) aligned with GS1/EPCIS and ISO 22005. The architecture emphasises EU open strategic autonomy (EU-anchored IP, manufacturing and integration), interoperability, and resource-efficient hardware. Across six use cases (feed safety, biosafety, animal safety and welfare, meat quality, side streams valorisation, and traceability) S4F targets measurable gains, improving time-to-detection, field accuracy, in side-stream valorisation, and traceability. Rigorous experimental design, common KPIs, and cross-site transfer tests ensure credible evidence and replicability. By delivering deployable sensors, explainable AI, and a reusable data/interop blueprint, S4F will (i) increase efficiency (speed/energy/accuracy) while reducing size/weight/power, (ii) de-risk uptake for SMEs and large processors, and (iii) provide a transferable model for adjacent chains (pork, dairy, aquaculture) and Digital Europe assets (data spaces, edge–cloud orchestration)—strengthening EU competitiveness and resilience in agri-food.