Handheld Scanner Will Ensure Food Quality, Freshness, And Safety

Most Americans aren't aware of just how much the experience of shopping for groceries has changed over the last century, or how it has been transformed from an intensely personal to an almost completely impersonal experience.

In my mother's early life, going to grocery store consisted of standing at a counter. You handed the grocer a list of what you wanted. The grocer then went behind the counter and brought back a basket of the groceries you requested, plus a few items he or she thought you might buy that would earn the store a few more pennies, or maybe some token of appreciation for your business. Grocery stores customarily gave good customers a sterling silver spoon for feeding when a new child was born (my brother and I got silver spoons even in the 1950's), for instance. Stores did not give customers who were behind on their accounts (you usually could get groceries on credit, even before there were credit cards) the silver spoons, hence the expression "born with a silver spoon in his mouth." Then you would visit the butcher, who had meat displayed on an open counter, with or without a sneeze guard, who might or might not give you the good piece (and then would find a way to adjust the price)and the greengrocer, who had mounds of vegetables and fruit through which you could rummage in hopes of finding something not spoiled.

By the time I came along, after World War II, you strolled through aisles of grocery items and produce, although you still had to negotiate with the butcher to get the piece of meat you wanted. (This was true until about 1970 in much of the United States. There are still stores in isolated areas that use this system.) Nobody wondered whether beef and chicken would contain Escherichia coli. You knew they did and cooked them thoroughly. By the 1950's, there were signs in the aisles telling you the prices, but the clerk had to remember the price of every item in the store. Then stores started using paper stickers to mark prices. The clerk only had to read the prices on the stickers and calculate the total on the cash register. Then stores started using bar codes.

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Bar codes made it possible to scan prices and calculate the total electronically. However, bar codes took away an important element of shopping. One hundred years ago, both you and the grocer were keenly aware of the quality and identify of your food. Your grocer might be trying to fool you about "additives" such as sawdust and rat hairs, but you certainly didn't have to worry about strange chemicals in your food. We now have much better food safety with regard to things like filth and insects, but with the advent of bar codes, the average market now carries 42,000 different products, and no one, not even the managers, will know when all the items arrived, how long they have been on the shelf, or whether they are really high quality. However, new technology may be about to bring us to the level of knowledge grocers and customers had in 1916. A new hand-held scanner will tell its users what is actually in an item, not just what the bar code says is in the item.

Groundbreaking Technology That Will Let You See Exactly What Is In Your Food

Two companies, SCiO and TellSpec, and working on hand-held scanners for consumer use. Based on the principles of spectroscopy, these scanners would be able to tell you whether the expensive fish in the fish counter was really white tuna or maybe just tilapia marked up in price, the actual variety of an apple, or whether a muffin contains gluten.  These hand held scanners, which could run on a processor the size of a seed of quinoa, could be integrated with smart phones to answer questions such as:

• Is this product expensive scallops or cheaper shark?
• Is there E. coli in this salad mix?
• When was this apple picked?
• Is the beer watered down?
• Is this oil from olives or safflower?
• Is this fluid honey or sugar syrup?
• Does this organic spinach contain more lutein than conventional spinach?
• Is this orange juice a better source of vitamin C than the other brand?
• Does this "dairy-free" product really contain dairy?
• Are their pesticides on these peaches?

The new optical scanners work on the same principle as a prism. Prisms separate light into its constituent colors. Different substances absorb and reflect different colors. We may not be able to detect individual wavelengths when looking at a food item, but chemicals and ingredients in the food will reflect certain wavelengths of light more strongly. The scanner will detect variations in those wavelengths and compare them to a massive database to detect whether a chemical or an ingredient is present, and how much.

The problem with this kind of technology would seem to be that it would take a tremendous amount of research to identify spectroscopic color profiles for one food product after another. Not only would the technology company have to identify the difference, say, between a Fuji apple and a Honeycrisp apple, it would have to account for differences between growers, when the apple was picked, how long it was stored, how long it had been on the display counter, and so on. However, TellSpec has come up with a way around this problem. The company's engineers have designed sampling algorithms and learning programs that circumvent the need for years of lab work. The TellSpec device works like this:

• A hand held scanner measures light coming off the test food. It measures the number of photos per wavelength reflected by the food.
• The processor turns the raw data into a graph spectrum, a "fingerprint" of the food. Each food has its own fingerprint.
• The processor transmits the fingerprint of the food to your smartphone through Bluetooth.
• Your smartphone uses its cell or wifi connection to transmit the fingerprint to a database in the cloud. TellSpec stores the data in your file for future use, and transmits outputs from the data analysis back to your phone, where they are displayed in an easy to read format.

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While this technology is something that won't be available until the future, it's not the distant future. The device is commercially available for $1250 during beta-testing now, and it will be on sale for $399 in August of 2016. Better freshness, purity, flavor, and quality will be yours, and because the market will also have access to the technology, better food will reach the supermarket floor.