It sounds like an infomercial pitch: simply place a small, laminated card under your food and be amazed as it keeps it fresher, longer! In other words, the Food Freshness Card sounds too good to be true. And yet, as USA Today reports, this innovation (?) won an Edison Award for Food Tech Solutions last week alongside other Spoon regulars like Chowbotics and Nima.
The Food Freshness card looks like a type of holographic Pokemon card that would be sold at that hardcore natural grocer that carries carob chips instead of chocolate and smells of sandalwood. It’s developed by Nature’s Frequencies, which doesn’t bother to explain how the Food Freshness Card works on its website. The company does, however, hold three patents on the technology used to manufacture the card, the abstract from one of which reads:
A food freshness card is disclosed which emits energy tuned to the natural frequency of fresh foods.
It then talks about scalar waves and goes on to say:
A material placed on a receiving coil at the receiving electrode receives the resultant wave information programming the material to emit energy tuned to the natural frequencies of fresh foods. Food or liquid placed within an effective radius of the card is kept fresher by exposure to the energetic information emitted by the material.
OK. Sure.
While the website may have a dearth of information on the inner workings of the Food Freshness Card, it has an abundance of videos showing the card in action. The card is placed under an array of fruits, vegetables and even bread, and through the magic of time lapse footage we see the food sitting atop the card last longer while its non-carded competition rots.
The card’s effectiveness was independently tested by Modern Testing Services, but I don’t know if it actually works (I reached out to them for follow up questions). I do know that the Food Freshness Card costs $75, is supposed to last one year, and got 117 backers on Indiegogo. FWIW, Nature’s Frequency will also sell you an Electromagnetic Fields (EMF) Cell Phone Chip (“to help assist your body in fighting off negative effects of EMF”), as well as Weight Management and Sleep assistance chips (all $75 a piece).
We’re all for companies fighting the good fight against food waste. Apeel makes a plant-based powder coating to keep food fresher longer, and StixFresh maintains food freshness simply by applying a sticker.
So who knows? Perhaps this laminated miracle does work as advertised. I’m just too skeptical right now to hand over my credit card for the Food Freshness Card without more digging.
