ACTPHAST 4R, financially supported by the European Commission and the Photonics Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) under the Horizon 2020 programme for Innovation Actions, has developed a new monitoring system to save thousands of tons of wasted food.
The simple low-cost technology indicates whether food is still perfectly edible. The technology looks at past exposure to heat. It tracks the temperatures of perishable food with handheld scanner. The sticky food label reacts to ultraviolet light and indicates the food’s unique status on a particular day. It provides accurate window of expiration. It gives food companies a precise picture of whether a food item has been affected during transit. The food can still be edible even after the ‘use-by’ date has passed.
The technology is developed by a team of researchers at the University of Cagliari, Italy.
With this, blanket ‘use-by’ dates could be a thing of the past thanks to the new accurate monitoring system being developed by Italian scientists at the University of Cagliari that aims to check the past exposure to warmth and genuinely tell whether food is unfit for human consumption.
A staggering 88 million tonne of food, valued at €143 billion, is wasted every year in the EU based on estimated dates for when food items are no longer safe to eat. The key to solving this major problem is having a simple low-cost technology which provides a precise and reliable indication of whether food is still perfectly edible even after the ‘use-by’ date has passed.
Prof Carbonaro and his team are working with ACTPHAST 4R – an EU innovation hub designed to give researchers working in academia throughout Europe access to top-level expertise and technologies in photonics.
Tracking temperatures of perishable food with a handheld scanner and a sticky label that reacts to ultraviolet light, the breakthrough technology can monitor past conditions that crucially alter shelf-life.
Supply chain workers can then assess the likely expiration date against a set of pre-programmed criteria in real-time to optimise the transport of goods - effectively fine-tuning the food item’s use-by date by the time it reaches a supermarket shelf.
“The handheld scanner allows us to extract an average temperature of the food: we exploit UV to activate our labels, and then use visible light to excite the Optically Stimulated Luminescence to read its history - extracting an average temperature which is compared to an expected value,” said Prof Carbonaro.
“Changes in temperatures during transportation can affect the shelf-life of fruit, for example, so we can tell instantly whether the foods have been exposed and how likely this will modify the expiration period. Our studies on wine showed that although the expiration period is not necessarily affected by the changes in temperature, the heat can have an impact on flavour, which is a very important criterion for vendors, producers and consumers,” he added.