Imagine putting food on your plate and having your computer tell you whether it is out of date, or contains unsuitable ingredients for you. Or imagine your fridge creating your shopping list when food gets low or when a product goes bad. Or even popping food in your oven for it to automatically start the appropriate cooking process. Well “nutrismart” an invention by London student Hannes Harms, may turn these ideas into a practical reality. Whilst at the same time, help create supply chain tracking improvements within the food industry.
The idea behind nutrismart is embedding printable edible RFID tags into food. An RFID reader in the nutrismart plate links to your computer and tells you information about what you are about to eat.
Giving you information such as:
- Shelf life / out of date details
- Audit history of the food e.g. for fish and meat
- Nutritional information such as calories and fat
- Whether the food is fit to eat
- Ingredients that you might be allergic to or give you an allergic reaction
The immediate suggestion is this application can be used for health and diet. Having RFID embedded in food however also has obvious benefits in the supply chain, from helping to create audit information to improving stock accuracy and logistics productivity.
Whilst the safety concerns of pushing RFID technology down our throats has not been discussed by Harms, the concept is itself is not new. For one thing, it can bring real benefits to the supply chain.
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