Supermarkets are dropping best before dates on some products, encouraging people to judge an item’s freshness for themselves. But what about when these dates are necessary but not always accurate? Solveiga Pakštaitė has a solution, and it feels good.
The USDA Economic Research Center reports that approximately one third of all available food is never consumed. To add insult to injury, most of it goes into landfills and ends up oozing out methane - which is substantially more harmful to the environment than CO2.
The current food labeling system is to blame for much of the waste. The FDA reports consumer confusion around product dating labels is likely responsible for around 20 percent of the food wasted in the home, costing an estimated US$161 billion per year.
Solveiga Pakštaitė never set out to tackle the world’s food waste problem. It was actually while working on a design project for people with visual impairments that she came up with her idea: a tactile food spoilage indicator.
Not everyone was initially enthused about Pakštaitė’s idea, which became her final year project for the industrial design and technology degree she was doing at London’s Brunel University. The concept, called Mimica Touch, is a temperature-sensitive label that changes texture when food spoils. Many of Pakštaitė’s university professors told her the idea was more food science than product design. But after a packaging design expert told her to patent the invention, she began to believe it had potential.
So, she entered the James Dyson award, which celebrates designers of new problem-solving ideas – “just to get feedback, and I thought it would look good on my CV. To my utter surprise, I got a call... telling me I’d won. It was all over the news. My surname was one of the answers in The Times crossword … and food companies and retailers started getting in touch to ask: ‘when can we try this? When can we test this?’ My initial reaction was: ‘what are you talking about?’ I made these gels in my university hall’s kitchens … there was a lot more work to do.”
Mimica Touch incorporates a plant-based gel into a label or bottle cap, which is layered over hard plastic bumps. The gel is calibrated to decompose at the same rate as the product inside, turning to liquid when it’s no longer fit for consumption, which is when users can feel the plastic bumps underneath.
Testing has shown the system can add anything from two days to a week to a product’s life. It’s thought that up to 60 percent of all food wasted in the UK is still safe to eat, and adding just two days onto ‘use by’ dates could cut the amount wasted by half.
It’s a problem that we all know urgently needs to be addressed: globally, one third of all food produced for human consumption is wasted every year. And if food waste was a country, it would be the third largest greenhouse gas emitter behind the US and China, accounting for 10 per cent of all greenhouse gases in the world.
Funding has been the main challenge in getting the concept from an idea to its first cap production run, which is now happening. “We had to get our technology working in the lab, then ‘productise’ it, ensuring the chemistry is accurate every time,” she says. Innovate UK, the Seafood Innovation Fund and the European Union have all contributed to Mimica’s projects so far, which have focused on creating labels for red meat and dairy, juice and smoothies, and seafood.
So, we can expect to see Mimica's innovative labels on products fairly soon. Certainly, in the UK as a slew of supermarkets are reportedly interested in the idea.
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