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Weekly Short
19 January, 2024
Food waste happens for all sorts of reasons: overbuying, poor meal planning and troublesome expiry and best before labels. Solutions to overbuying and meal planning are in your hands, but defying date labels might require a bit of help.
Date labels are often misinterpreted. You may have caught the news last autumn that Sainsbury’s swapped use-by dates for best-before dates across its milk range to prevent wasting milk that is perfectly safe to consume – and this message should resonate across other foodstuffs too.
Enter Mimica Lab, who have produced the Bump Cap: a temperature-sensitive cap that gives you a real time indication of the freshness of your food and drink. The Bump Cap encourages you to store food and drink at the right temperature, reducing waste by changing the cap’s texture (to bumpy!) when it is no longer safe for consumption.
Bump Caps are already fighting waste with the protein drinks brand EXALT – a fan favourite of our CEO, Giles Gibbons – increasing the use-by date by up to four days. Bump is also compatible with meat and seafood, with current studies suggesting that a Bump Tag can extend the life of salmon, prawns and cod by up to six days.
Interestingly, Bump also conducted research on a bump indicator to help the monitoring and storage of Covid-19 vaccines, so they were kept safe in developing countries prone to power outages. They’re definitely hard at work, looking to integrate their technology on a wide variety of products and packaging.
We’re all for supporting innovative and sustainable tech like this, and if you are too, be sure to check out and support their investment campaign on CrowdCube.
By Bertie Bateman