Measuring Food Freshness

A new technology that gives the expiry date of a food product based on the time elapsed since its production and on the temperature of its environment has been developed by a Norwegian company.

All over the world, tons of perfectly good food are thrown away daily, because of imprecise expiry dates on products.

In Norway, food retailers discard over 50,000 tonnes of food annually and so, this new technology could substantially reduce this wastefulness.

Researchers have identified the problem as being the conventional marking of expiry dates.

Temperature-sensitive food products are marked with a use-by date that tells the consumer for how long the item will keep its quality, but the problem is that food products' quality also depends on the temperature it is stored in.

Time Temp is the company that developed this new method of measuring the freshness of food more precisely, by using a shelf-life indicator attached directly to the product, that does not only measure time, but also the temperatures to which the item has been exposed.

“Our indicator gives a running countdown of a food item’s remaining shelf life based on time elapsed and its temperature environment, all the way from the production line to the consumer’s refrigerator shelf at home,” said Christian Salbu Aasland, head of TimeTemp AS.

The technology is patented and could replace conventional marking of expiry dates, and also enable the consumer to see at which temperature the product was kept and also if the way it is stored at home is correct.

A prototype of the technology already exists and the company hopes to bring it on the market sometime next year.

“When we consider that a billion people around the world are starving, this is a massive waste of resources we cannot allow ourselves to continue,” says Aasland.