Scrap sell-by dates – and say hello to the revolutionary smart food packaging of the future
Picture the scene. You’re in the supermarket to grab some essentials: milk, bread, chicken, veg. You pick up each item, and instead of an expiry date, there’s simply a green tick or red cross. Green for good, red for bad. You head home and check the app connected to your fridge, which tells you which items have gone off and which are still fine to eat. Something looks questionable; you take a quick snap on your phone, using an AI filter to analyse the texture and determine whether you should risk it. This could well be the future – a system in which technology is used to prevent food poisoning outbreaks and save the vast glut of waste blighting the modern world.
Professor Tohid Didar is one of the pioneers in the smart packaging vanguard, developing sci-fi-sounding tech as part of a team based at Canada’s McMaster University.
“I think there’s absolutely no choice but to start using this kind of technology with – there are a lot of people suffering,” he says.
