Texts from Your Fridge Soon to Be a Reality

Photo credit: Wageningen University.

Anyone who has ever stood in a kitchen, pondering whether or not that bag of salad greens looks past its prime, will be intrigued by this week’s news from the United Kingdom. The Daily Mail reports that soon, packaged perishable foods might be tagged with microchips that will text consumers just before they go bad.

A text from your salad while you’re still at work that says “Eat Me Tonight!” is a dream scenario for any busy home cook, but how does it work?

Scientists at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, led by program manager Toine Timmermans, have been working on a microchip called the Pasteur tag to measure ethylene (the gas given off as food degrades) as well as temperature, light, and time. Originally intended to be attached to whole pallets of food, Timmermans emailed us that “the chips will use GPS and mobile technology to SMS/text to mobile phones.” Translation: In the future, your fridge will be texting you.

We spoke to Baroness Scott of Needham Market, the chair of the Parliament committee that investigates food waste in the United Kingdom. “It’s been estimated that in Europe, we throw away as much food as they produce in sub-Saharan Africa,” she told us. “The average household throws away 600 pounds a year.” (In the United States, we’re no better; each person throws away 20 pounds of food per month—40 percent of what we buy.)

But why would supermarkets have an incentive to adopt a pricey new technology? We put the question to Scott, who said she had spoken to representatives from the big chains. “They started off thinking that way,” she admitted, but research showed that “consumers who save money by wasting less food continue to spend it on food—but they buy better quality food.” That is, your friend who labels everything in her fridge and always uses up grub before it goes bad is still spending as much as you are at the grocery store; she uses the balance of her shopping budget to buy other pricey goods. “It means the supermarkets aren’t losing any money,” said Scott. Since consumers have put “quite a lot of pressure now on supermarkets” to reduce food waste, they are under the gun from Parliament.

Scott didn’t have a timeline for how soon the technology might be commercially available, but she did say that “the EU is the most focused in the world on the question of food waste.” She reminded us, too, that that existing sell-by date stamp isn’t the best judge of freshness. “We’re throwing away a lot of very good food.” Since the chip will track the food’s vitals, as it were, it prevents needless waste based on fear of food poisoning. “The point of the chip is it reflects how food is actually kept.”

All we know is we’re looking forward to not inspecting our food for fur in order to know if it’s good enough to eat.

[Daily Mail via Food News Journal]