IT can lead to your fridge becoming a biohazard and costs UK families around £11 billion a year in waste – but now a Scottish inventor has solved the problem of jars of food festering unnoticed by creating a "smart" label that tells you when it is time they went in the bin.
Edinburgh-based Pete Higgins has scooped a £50,000 prize to develop his Use Within label (UWI), which counts down the days a jar stays fresh and turns red when its contents are no longer palatable.
He won the Barclays 2011 Take One Small Step competition with his idea and will now be given cash to develop his invention and put it into the shops.
He said: “I came up with the idea one day when I was feeding my son and I reached for a jar of mayonnaise which said ‘eat within four weeks of opening’.
“I realised I had no idea how fresh it was and set about thinking how I could come up with something which would let me know.
“The idea was simple, but it took a lot of work to figure out a way to make it a reality.”
Now at the prototype stage, the label uses a chemical reaction which is activated when the jar is opened and displays how long it will stay fresh with a series of small green squares.
When the final one is reached, the label turns red -- meaning that the food within is no longer safe to eat.
To work out how to make label function, Mr Higgins sought the help of Dr Will Shu, a lecturer at Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University, to collaborate on the scientific development and overall design of the UWI label, with the goal of it becoming a standard feature on every food jar throughout the world.
More than £11bn worth of food -- or £680 per family -- is wasted every year in the UK, much of it thrown out while still edible and safe to consume. Mr Higgins hopes his system could have a significant impact on both the amount of food being unnecessarily discarded and the money people spend on their shopping.
It could also have other uses -- such as ensuring medical supplies with a limited shelf life are not used by accident.
He added: “My initial aim was to help to reduce the amount of food wasted each year, save people money and minimise the risk of illness, but I am now keen to investigate how it can be used for other products such as blood transfusion bags, veterinary and pharmaceutical products, industrial glues and sealants and even cosmetics -- in fact, anything with a critical shelf life once it has been opened.”
Having already attracted around £50,000 in investment and developed a working model, the prize will go towards funding a way to mass-market the label to sell to manufacturers.
Dr Shu, an academic at the School of Engineering and Physical Sciences, said: “It has taken Pete over three years to develop this product and we have been working with him for the past 18 months to bring it to its final stage. The results have exceeded our expectations.
“I am delighted to have been involved in what has been a highly exciting journey and look forward to continuing to work with Pete to develop the device further for use in other products and move into other business sectors.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article