Immense savings to be made in convenience goods trade
Every year in Europe alone, fruit and vegetables to a value of an incredible SEK 100 billion perish. Successful experiments which the research centre iPack has carried out together with Fresh Services indicate that in the future, it will be possible to stop much of the losses, the equivalent of 10% of the total market value for fresh produce.
Packagings that contain fruit and other fresh produce which can sense and alarm when something goes wrong sounds too good to be true! But, this technology is already available. The project is called Fresh Food Tracker and has been initiated by Billerud, and is being run by the wholly owned company Fresh Services. This has been developed by iPack, a research centre associated with KTH.
Quite recently, field studies were carried out which also show that the technology is very reliable.
“Fresh Services, in cooperation with iPack, have carried out experiments on freighters across the Atlantic from Brazil to the Netherlands, an extremely aggressive environment,” says Julius Hållstedt, vice chairman of the research centre iPack. He therefore confirms the extreme conditions for the technology.
Fresh Food Tracker manages to keep track of everything from temperature, vibrations, pressure on the packagings, air humidity to carbon dioxide, oxygen and ethylene levels.
Everything is reported automatically via airborne communication, but it is also possible to check up manually as to how the fresh produce is coping. If the cartons or other items of equipment need to be reconfigured, this is possible, irrespective of where the produce is.
According to Julius Hållstedt, it is fully possible to start up operations on a commercial basis in a few years time. And there is no lack of interest from the market either.
“There has been an incredible response. When we first presented the technology, many companies got in touch with us, and we have received considerable attention. “We will buy it, we want to evaluate it”, says Julius Hållstedt.
Research continues, it is now concentrating on a reduction of the manufacturing prices for some of the sensors that can be used.
For more information, contact Julius Hållstedt at juliush@kth.se or 08-790 4376, alternatively Tobias Bergarp at Fresh Services: 070 - 316 68 49.
Peter Larsson