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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

food traceability

This Company is Using Baker’s Yeast to Create Invisible Barcodes That Track Food Through the Supply Chain

In a world where food-borne illnesses and food fraud are happening at ever-greater frequencies, tracking food provenance through the supply chain is becoming increasingly critical. The challenge, however, is that the further an ingredient travels from the farm to our plate, the harder it becomes to determine where it came from.

Enter the barcode made from baker’s yeast. A company out of Canada named Index Biosystems has developed a way to use nothing more than the single-cell microorganism and water – combined with its proprietary tracking software – to trace the point of origin for pretty much any type of food product.

According to Index, the company can create a BioTag – the company’s name for its baker’s yeast barcode – by mixing baker’s yeast in extremely trace with water, then spraying or misting it onto a product such as wheat. The spray equipment that applies the water/BioTag mixture varies, but Index says it’s usually just a simple nozzle. The company says that BioTags are incredibly sticky once applied and remain attached to the surface of the grains, withstanding the milling process while remaining detectable in flour. To detect the BioTag, the company or one of its customers uses molecular detection techniques such as PCR and DNA sequencing (because the “bar code” is essentially the unique DNA sequence of the baker’s yeast).

According to Index’s CEO Mike Borg, the company’s technology only needs a small sample of flour – a metric gram – to determine every farm involved in producing the wheat that made that flour. He says that with the company’s BioTags and GS1 standards, they can verify the carbon footprint of a slice of bread.

Borg says that because the BioTag does not involve any genetic modification, the company has already received approval for using the tags in food products from the U.S. FDA and Health Canada. He also says the platform has been proven across various products ranging from commodities to pharmaceuticals.

The challenge of food traceability has been one of the biggest focuses in the food industry in recent years, leading to various approaches, such as NFTs for cattle to digestible food sensors. But by using a DNA-based tracking approach using something as simple as baker’s yeast, Index has essentially taken the bar code concept and integrated it into the food itself.

Food Tech News: Virtual Derby Fare Is Upon Us

The Kentucky Derby is around the corner! Not that I or many other folks will be physically present for the famed event this year. We will, however, be cooking up some classic Derby fare, courtesy of the internet. Read on for more on that as well as other food tech news bits from the last week.

Virtual Derby Menu 2020

Churchill Downs Racetrack, home of the Kentucky Derby, is once again offering an at-home Derby menu for couch-bound attendees of the famous event — of which there will be many more this year, given the venue’s reduced capacity requirements. For the event, taking place September 5, Churchill Downs has created an at-home menu fans can access online and create in their own home kitchens. 

Africa’s First High-Tech Greenhouse

Van der Hoeven Horticultural Projects has started construction on the first fully automated glass lettuce greenhouse in Africa. The greenhouse, outside Cairo, Egypt and roughly 2.5 hectares in size, will grow herbs and lettuce, while automation technology will regulate climate and plant density for more optimal growing in desert conditions.

The Profitability of Plant-Based Eggs

Eat Just, maker of the famed JUST plant-based egg, is on track to profitability, according to a report this week from Reuters. The company aims to turn an operating profit before the end of next year is also considering and initial public offering.

Target All-In on Online Grocery

Target announced this week that its grocery pickup service is now available across the U.S. The service is now available in about 85 percent of its stores. For now, only Target’s most popular items (about 750 of them) are available for pickup, though the ongoing popularity of online grocery could change that in the future.

FoodLogiQ, IBM Food Trust, ripe.io and SAP Demonstrate Successful Interoperability in Food Traceability

Information standards company GS1 US announced today the completion of a proof-of-concept in which multiple traceability systems successfully interoperated when following a product through a supply chain. This first part of a multi-phase trial included blockchain, cloud and other technologies from FoodLogiQ, IBM Food Trust, ripe.io and SAP.

GS1 is a non-profit that creates global unique numbering and identification systems, barcodes, Electronic Product Code-based RFID and more for supply chains. Using the GS1 standard, FoodLogiQ, IBM Food Trust, ripe.io and SAP simulated a seafood supply chain and shared data with one another. According to the press announcement, the group was able to communicate with one another about critical events in the supply chain such as when a product was shipped, received, packed or transformed.

In a FoodLogiQ blog post, FoodLogiQ CEO, Sean O’Leary said, “The adoption of traceability in the food industry is reaching a tipping point. With the successful completion of this proof-of-concept, we have demonstrated that regardless of the underlying technology being used to house the data, whether blockchain or other enterprise database technologies, food companies will be able to connect their systems to achieve the holy grail of whole chain traceability.”

In a nutshell, food traceability won’t be locked into or reliant on one particular technology. Different systems in the supply chain will be able to talk with one another to provide insights and verification as a product moves throughout the supply chain.

Now the coalition of companies is moving on the next proof-of-concept phase, which is adding suppliers, distributors, retailers and foodservice operators to see how it will work in a real-world setting. After the proof-of-concept phase is complete, the next step will be to understand data requirements and see if any new protocols are required for interoperability.

The global COVID-19 pandemic highlighted shortcomings and faults in our existing food supply chain. Successful demonstrations of technology interoperability like the one announced today can help create a more robust, transparent and hopefully resilient supply chain going forward.

Researchers Hope Sprayable ‘Barcoded’ Microbes Provide Better Food Traceability

While interest in the topic of food traceability has intensified due to a certain pandemic, tracking down the origin of food has been a puzzle scientists were trying to solve long before any of us heard of COVID-19.

Whether it’s food blockchain or edible food sensors, there’s been no shortage of ideas over the last few years for better food provenance. And now, thanks to a team of Harvard researchers, we have a new approach: using sprayable inert bacteria or yeast spores that could act like DNA “barcodes” to help identify us the source of food.

Here’s how the team described their discovery:

We created a synthetic, scalable microbial spore system that identifies object provenance in under 1 hour at meter-scale resolution and near single-spore sensitivity and can be safely introduced into and recovered from the environment.

What’s interesting to me is how durable the spores are, detectable all the way to the consumer plate as they withstand the cooking process.

To test out their idea, the researchers tested the microbes across various surfaces and put them through the paces of washing, frying and more.

From the New Scientist:

The team then sprayed the spores on various surfaces including sand, soil, carpet and wood. They were able to detect them three months later even on surfaces that were swept or vacuumed, or subjected to simulated wind or rain.

Next the spores were sprayed on plants growing in pots. A week later, the team were able to identify which pot a leaf came from. To their surprise, the spores remained detectable even after washing, boiling, frying and microwaving. So if unique spores were sprayed on crops at different farms before harvesting, authorities could rapidly find out where any specific produce came from.

While the idea of putting inert spores on food holds significant potential as a way to help during outbreaks of food-borne disease, unlike other approaches like blockchain, this approach would not give us visibility into the myriad stops a food travels on its way to the consumer plate beyond its original source of origin. That said, it’s a promising new approach as we move towards a post-COVID world where food source tracking is fast becoming a requirement.

Just Salad’s Latest Menu Innovation: Adding Your Carbon Footprint to Your Meal

One of our favorite topics here at The Spoon right now is the reinvention of the restaurant menu. Social distancing and new guidelines around restaurant reopenings are forcing businesses to forgo the standard reusable menu and adopt digital versions customers can view on mobile devices. It’s a big switch and not without its operational headaches. But it also opens up a lot of doors in terms of the kind of information that could eventually be available on the restaurant menu. 

For example, the carbon footprint of your lunch.

Fast-casual chain Just Salad announced today it will now label all of its menu items with a corresponding carbon footprint. The score for each menu item is calculated in partnership with a team at the NYU Stern School of Business, and will reflect “the total estimated greenhouse gas emissions associated with the production of ingredients in each menu item,” according to a press release from Just Salad.

These carbon footprints will first rollout on the chain’s website. Since digital menus are becoming the norm, it’s unclear if those changes will make it to physical menus, or indeed if those will even be in stores in the future. An exact date for the carbon footprint info on online menus has not yet been set.

Just Salad’s online menu is already fairly robust in terms of the nutritional information it provides customers about their meals. Hovering over an item pulls up the same nutrition facts one might read on the label of a box in the grocery store, and, for build-your-own salads and wraps, updates itself based on each ingredient you add to the mix. 

Since the carbon footprint scores for Just Salad’s menu items aren’t yet live, we don’t quite know what they’ll look like in digital format. I imagine they’ll be merged with the ingredients interface in some way so that a customer can view the nutritional and sustainability info of their meal in a single place. And while there was no mention of it in the press release, one imagines food traceability information could also eventually make its way into this new format. 

The carbon scores are a small step in menu development, but very telling in how this mandatory push to digital menus could welcome a new era of transparency when it comes to knowing where our food comes from and how our eating impacts the planet. In the ongoing quest for silver linings to come out of the current restaurant industry upheaval, this is definitely one of them.