ABC Food

1. Summary

The city provides three meals a day to all citizens.

• Food boxes are reusable and delivered to citizens' presence via the city logistics system including underground tunnels and delivery bots.

• One large cold storage facility is to collect food materials from outside the city and distribute them to several food factories scattered over the city.

• The food remnants are collected and reused for livestock feed etc.

ABC Food's main objective is to significantly reduce the cost of foods for citizens and to upgrade the quality of food through economies of scale and automation.

2. Facilities & Devices

It is expected that the cost of food production will be reduced by less than half compared to current one. The main methods are automation, robotics, AI and online.

For example, If you order fried chicken from a nearby store, it is fried on site and delivered by people using various vehicles. The inefficiencies or problems this practice include;

• To deliver 300 grams of fried chicken, people and vehicles weighing hundreds of times move.

• The cooking materials such as frying oil may not be properly managed.

• The cooking process may not be optimized, and the operating efficiency of the equipment involved may be low. For example, in a typical fried chicken shop in Korea, the fryer operates less than 3 hours a day.

The main reason of so many fried chicken shops in Korea is that the product should be delivered in quite a short time: the quality of fried foods degrades rapidly as time goes on.

Let's assume there are high-speed underground logistics tunnels across the city of 200,000 citizens. Quite small logistics robots run through the tunnel in self driving mode. Actually, we are designing that. See ABC Logistics for detail.

• ABC Logistics is designed to deliver any product in a few minutes. For example, For fried chicken that must be delivered within 5 minutes of completing the frying process, a fried chicken shop may be located every 5 km radius. In fact, ABC Pilot City has a food complex every 5 km radius.

• By delivering the fried chicken via ABC Logistics, we can reduce the delivery cost less than a half of current one. Of course, it includes the cost of building the tunnel and the cost of producing the robot vehicle.

• Automating the cooking processes can significantly reduce the cost of human labors.

• Mass production and increased machine operating time also significantly reduce the cost.

• The quality of products are strictly controlled, resulting in highly delicious fried chickens.

By optimizing production and delivery mechanism, the production cost of a fried chicken can be reduced to a half of current ones. Then, why not apply this mechanism to all kinds of foods consumed in the city?

Let's code it.

1. One Food Storage

The city has one repository for food materials arrived to the city.

• Located near the center of the city.

• All food materials arrive here and distributed directly to nearby food factory.

• All food materials are delivered in standard boxes. For example, raw fishes are kept in specially designed fish cold boxes.

• All parcels are delivered by autonomous vehicles, and loaded or unloaded by robots.

2. Food Storage Boxes

All storage boxes are small linux machines which records what kinds of materials they store, when, how long, what are usages, and where are their destinations etc. They may control the temperature inside.

3. One Food Factory with Many Suppliers

More than 600,000 meals a day are made in the food factory located near to the food materials' storage.

• All the machines and labors are controlled by the city.

• For competition, several food suppliers make foods in the food factory, but they all share the same food storage.

• Basically, foods are delivered to clients via logistics system, but, some suppliers may request clients to visit nearby shops. For example, Korean charcoal grilled ribs(숯불갈비) are not proper to be delivered, and the supplier may open a franchise with several restaurants in the city.

4. Food Complex

As described above, some foods such as noodles and BBQ(숯불갈비) are not proper to be delivered via the city logistics system.

There will be several food complexes in the city where citizens may visit and have more formal meals.

• All restaurants are franchise only.

• All the process of cooking are monitored and regulated by the city such as ISO 9000.

3. Citizens

There are two kinds of citizens: residents and visitors. The city provides three meals to them equally.

• A citizen may choose food from the menu which lists various kinds of meals: Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Russian etc.

• The orderer also designates where to receive her food box. It may be a house, an office, a cafe, a public park, anywhere in the city.

• She can also adjust the amount of main and side dishes.

• She may set a default menu so that she need not select the main and side dishes of every meal.