From all the food produced worldwide, approximately one third is wasted. A significant share of this wastage happens at the retail level, yet end consumers, inefficient logistic processes and improper storage in the value chain also bear a contribution. As a consequence, there are increasing government efforts and initiatives on the EU level and elsewhere in order to cut the amount of food waste.
We believe that in order to overcome this issue, one requires low-cost tracking capabilities to enable all the participants along the food value chain, from food producers to logistic companies, retailers, and customers, to track single food items and monitor the product freshness. Among the monitored parameters, there shall be not only the manufacturing date and the temperature but also additional biochemical parameters providing product's actual freshness status in real time. Continuous monitoring of these parameters allows for an estimation of a dynamic expiry date. Nowadays, a product often spends most of its lifetime in transit or storage, actual freshness monitoring during these stages is still missing.
Is it fresh wireless sensor technology (www.is-it-fresh.com) will enable affordable food freshness data on a single packaging unit scale. Every package will be able to communicate with external readout devices wirelessly and report its freshness status for the product inside in real time. This will provide each partner in the food value chain with unique and wirelessly accessible data about product's current freshness status as well as origin and transport logs. In addition, it will give the end customer a valuable insight into the freshness status of their food products and an actual dynamic expiry date, for example, by addressing the sensors via a fridge or smart shelf.
The goal of the SME Instrument Phase 2 funded project is to validate the technology in the market through pilot projects with potential industrial customers. The major challenge for conducting pilot tests in the food industry is the amount of prototypes/demonstrators required for such a test. As a rule, unit numbers of 100 or 1,000 are required. In order to manufacture this number of freshtag prototypes and conduct the pilot projects, a pilot manufacturing system is being designed and developed. The system will allow for manufacturing of 100 million freshtag units a year at a cost of several cents. The pilot manufacturing system will be accompanied by a quality control monitoring system including electrical and optical inspection units as well as a calibration units for on-wafer mass-calibration of sensors.
For the realization of the pilot projects, industrial NFC readers are also being developed that enable a variety of B2B scenarios such as readout on a conveyor belt or on retail shelves in a supermarket. At last, a cloud system is being optimized to handle an increasing number of database queries from a large number of freshtags working simultaneously.
To summarize, the 4 main objectives included in the project are:
1. Development of a pilot manufacturing system:
2. Optimization of the freshtag manufacturing process:
3. Pilot validation with industrial customers:
4. Development of the commercialization strategy and an innovation business plan:
