Innovation Anthology #708:
You hope when you buy your meat at the grocery store, the product is fresh.
You check the colour, and maybe even smell the package, but you don’t really know what’s happened to that meat between the packing house and your shopping cart.
But what if the package itself changed colour to indicate the level of freshness?
As Dr. Carlo Montemagno explains, that’s a bit of nanotechnology the scientists at Ingenuity Lab are working on.
DR CARLO MONTEMAGNO: The idea is we can make smart materials that can package foods that control the transport of oxygen across the film, so that it provides an indicator when enough oxygen has gone through. You can think, well, the food is not quite as fresh as you want it to be. And you also can provide packaging that will identify to you if food has reached added temperature, so that it’s gotten warmer than it should have been sometime in the process of its handling. So the idea is that for almost no cost, we can provide a consumer indicator and also allow the stores and the people who distribute it, to know they have an active way of monitoring the foods that they are selling.
According to Dr. Carlo Montemagno, blue dots would appear in the plastic wrap to indicate the meat is off.
Thanks today to INGENUITY LAB
Learn more at Innovation Anthology.com
I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
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Ingenuity Lab
Program Date: 2015-08-18