Mimica Touch relabels the food waste problem
by Startacus Admin
Mimica Touch - The startup that has created a biologically active food expiry label to help combat food waste.
In the UK, 7 million tonnes of food and drink is thrown away every year. Much of this is due to people looking at the ‘use by’ date and throwing away out-of-date food and drink without stopping to check if it really has gone bad. Whether this is easy to check for yourself, like a block of Cheddar or a bottle of milk, or something risky like chicken or fish, a huge number of people choose the safe and costly route of simply throwing it away if the date says so.The problem of both food waste and sustainable living is a big issue to solve. Think, Too Good To Go who recently raised 6m to keep fighting food waste or pioneering meat wholesaler Ethical Butcher with their carbon negative meat, as two recent examples.
Use-by dates. The question of whether use-by dates should be done away with has been debated more and more in recent years but, if so, should it be replaced by a simple ‘best before’ or something a little more clear cut for people?
London-based Mimica Lab thinks the latter. Rather than have people take the risk of potentially unsafe food and drink, the startup has created a new, unique label to better indicate whether their consumables have spoiled.
The Mimica Touch is a label that changes its texture so that when you rub a finger over it and it is smooth, the food is still good, but when the label becomes bumpy, the food has spoiled.
It’s a simple method that is plain to understand, doesn’t rely on the estimates of printed dates, and simultaneously provides those with visual impairment a clear indicator of whether their food is still safe.
This technology stands to save the average family between £470 (Mimica’s estimate) and £700 (The Telegraph’s estimate) per year on food wastage. This is probably one of the reasons that Mimica Lab founder Solveiga Pakštait was named 2017’s Inventor of the Year by MIT’s Technology Review and won the James Dyson Award for her invention in 2014.
The idea of a simple label to massively reduce food wastage is one that will never go out of date!
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Published on: 10th March 2019
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