# RFID Based Embedded System for Sustainable Food Management in an IoT Network Paradigm
## 1 Introduction  
One third of the food produced in the world yearly (approximately 1.3 billion tons) ends up in the rubbish [1]. This means that one-third of economic and human resources used in its production are wasted. Moreover, an unnecessary increment of carbon footprint takes place [1]. Besides the waste of food and carbon footprint, another problem related to eating habits is that of health diseases with 39% of adults being overweight, 13% of them being obese, according to data from 2014 [2].  
Despite the problem being globally measured, food-related behavior changes may be applied in house environments to obtain a worldwide effect. The kitchen where food is wasted, mainly in the kitchen furniture (fridge, cabinets, and shelves). Consumers are used to making unplanned purchases. They also have no control of available products, its expiration date, nor a list of recipes they can prepare with them. This, added to the purchase of rare ingredients, which are barely used in a single recipe [3], create a loss of money and food for customers. Specifically, customers suffer an average loss of 850 USD/year [3].  
Internet of Things (IoT) architectures for smart cities require technologies to sense the environment by connecting intelligent devices to build a sustainable smart society. Within all technologies included in the IoT paradigm, radio frequency identification (RFID) is the most popular technology in retailscenarios. Specifically, the Electronic Product Code (EPC) [4] is the de facto standard for item-level identification in retail, to monitor stock and detect user-object interactions or hand gestures. Moreover, the information stream provided by RFID technology is a useful source of information to implement intelligent systems, where the electronic labels transform the store products into smart objects, providing rich information such as their type of ingredient, calories, or expiration date.  
This paper presents a food management system, RFID Food Management (RFM) to monitor all products available at home, recommending suitable recipes to prepare with them in order to reduce the waste of food in our daily life, which is our overall goal. Furthermore, our real-time embedded system enhances the supply-chain management by offering product promotions to complete recipe recommendations. We also aim to control the amount of consumed calories, so that it can lead to a healthy lifestyle. Specifically, the following objectives have been set out:  
* A comparison of real-time recipe recommendation algorithms based on the availability of ingredients in the kitchen;
* A real-time embedded system that monitors the available ingredients, and provides its information for further processing;
* A product promotion system to enhance the supply chain management.  
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 introduces the problem motivation and related state of the art. The RFID Food Management system is described in Section 3. Section 4 introduces our approaches of smart recommendation algorithms, which are tested in Section 5. Finally, we conclude the paper in Section 6.