Food Twin

Food Twin is a free, open-source proof-of-concept digital twin of food supply chains from The Plotline, Earth Genome's food-and-climate data project, built with Zia Mehrabi's Better Planet Laboratory at CU Boulder; Development Seed built most of the web application. It addresses how little is known about where food comes from, and how droughts, heat waves, conflicts or port disruptions in one region reach consumers elsewhere.

The Global Food Twin, launched in June 2025, models production, demand, trade and multi-modal transport of 82 food groups across 3,787 subnational regions in 240 countries, estimating least-cost flows over maritime, rail, road and inland-waterway networks. Its production layer combines CROPGRIDS crop data, FAO livestock density and FAO catch data on a 10 km grid normalised to 2020; CU Boulder reports the team also used satellite ship-tracking data. The original US Food Twin (November 2023) estimated county-level crop production from the USDA Cropland Data Layer, converted from satellite observations, and modelled heat and drought impacts on more than 25 crops and crop groups.

Users select any region on the map to see the food it supplies, the transport routes it depends on, and the nutritional impact on people (calories, protein, iron, vitamin A), alongside economic indicators. The team reports that roughly 9% of subnational regions account for 80% of global caloric flows. The model outputs are published openly on Harvard Dataverse and Source Cooperative, with methodology and code on GitHub.