Smart food sensors could cut the amount of fruit 'n' veg dumped

Researchers at Manchester’s Syngenta Sensors University Innovation Centre are developing intelligent, low-cost sensors that will allow more scientific ‘best before’ dates to be set by food producers and retailers.

The sensors are integrated with Oyster-card type Radio Frequency ID (RFID) technology that can be used to track real-time stresses suffered by perishable goods from leaving the farm to arrival at the retailer.

In the UK, £20 billion of food is dumped each year, with food making up the single largest source of commercial waste at approximately 21 per cent. Now chemists, engineers and physicists are working together to develop a system that uses battery-free RFID tags to monitor and record stress profiles.

The environmental benefits of the technology should go a long way towards reducing the amount of unfit produce that reaches the shelves, therefore reducing the amount of unwanted food that is dumped and the carbon emissions used in growing it.

The University of Manchester is predicting the technology application will also be quickly taken up by the UK’s food retailing businesses because of its low cost. Its projected costs of around 10 to 20 pence, rather than £20 at present, makes it commercially more viable to take up.

Dr Bruce Grieve, director of the Syngenta Sensors University Innovation Centre at The University of Manchester, said: “There are both economic and environmental drivers behind the desire for this kind of technology. The economic motivation for companies in the food supply chain is to reduce the hidden costs that we all bear when purchasing fresh produce. Only a percentage of that produce makes it all the way to our plates and so when we shop we are paying an invisible fee for these losses.”

“As consumers we may see some of this saving reflected in cheaper fruit and vegetables, while the companies that introduce and invest in this technology will also gain economically,” continued Dr Grieve.

As well as reducing food waste, Dr Grieve highlighted a number of other environmental benefits of adopting the technology, such as reduced fuel usage by minimising transportation of stressed and rejected produce, as well as reducing the environmental impact of unfit produce going into landfill.

“But most importantly for climate change,” explained Dr Grieve, “it could also reduce the total synthetic fertilisers and nitrogen usage per tonne of food consumed. This currently accounts for around 70 per cent of carbon used in typical crop production.”

Dr Grieve and the team of scientists will be working with colleagues in industry to refine the technology, and a key aim is to explore how it can be utilised at the lowest possible cost: “The first generation of this technology will be based upon silicon but our plan is to the use plastic printed electronics in later generations to make the sensor tags compatible in cost with the humble bar code”, explained Dr Grieve.

It’s unlikely that UK businesses and consumers will benefit from this exciting research much before the middle of next decade. “This is adventurous research and won’t be with us tomorrow. Realistically we will have ironed out the major scientific hurdles by around the end of 2010 and then there is a significant step to translate this into a final device using appropriate manufacturing techniques. The commercial silicon sensor-tag could be with us in about three to five years, whereas the printed plastic equivalent may be here in 2015,” explained Dr Grieve.