Trend in foodtech – food safety
In a previous article we introduced the theme of foodtech (https://www.completefood.it/en/world-trend-foodtech/), giving a brief summary of the main areas in which the most innovative food companies in the world they are working.
Let’s talk today about the Food Safety area.
It is a sector born of the growing demand from consumers to really know what they are eating. People always want to understand more about the origin of a food product, the degree of control to which it is subjected, the type of cultivation and production process with which an ingredient or product was originated, and much more.
Some serious accidents of the past have greatly lowered consumer confidence compared to what is indicated on the food label.
We think, just to mention some striking examples of the last twenty years, of the mad cow scandal of the early 2000s, of the bird flu problem a few years later, of the case of meat with dioxin, the outbreak of swine fever, the episodes in which blue mozzarellas were found, to the scam of horse meat sold as beef in Holland in 2013. In short, how to blame consumers!
To monitor food from the field to the table, one of the answers is the use of so-called IoT (Internet of Things) technologies.
However, it is not easy to maintain high food safety standards given the enormous size of the food market. On the one hand, the presence of organic and natural foods is increasingly required, grown without the use of fertilizers and products without preservatives, on the other hand without automating the control processes, the certainty that what is stated on the label is never true.
A very interesting company active in the sector is TellSpec (http://tellspec.com/eng/). This is a Canadian company committed to developing technologies capable of monitoring food fraud and contamination events, through the use of AI (artificial intelligence) connected to a cloud-based analysis engine. TellSpec technologies are aimed at both consumers and public food safety control authorities.
You can see how one of their products works in this short video in English on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=56&v=-PhVfCJg9Qw