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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Zest Labs

This Laminated Card Claims to Keep Food Fresher, Longer

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.

Zest Labs Sues Walmart for $2B Alleging Food Waste Tech Theft

Fighting food waste is a big problem with a big business opportunity for the growing number of companies trying to reduce it. Whenever there’s big money to be made, lawsuits are sure to follow. Sure enough, yesterday Zest Labs and its parent company, Ecoark Holdings, sued Walmart for $2 billion over Walmart’s Eden technology, which aims to reduce food waste by improving the shelf life of produce (hat tip to Silicon Valley Business Journal).

As we’ve written before: “Zest Labs offers Zest Fresh, a sensor-based logistics system to measure produce freshness. Zest Fresh assigns each pallet of produce an individual code that marks product type and data related to its exposure to the elements which would impact its spoilage. That information is uploaded to the company’s proprietary cloud where the data can presumably be tracked by anyone in the value chain from farm to distributor.”

According to Zest, the company met with Walmart in 2015 to demonstrate its technology for the retail giant, and from Zest Labs’ lawsuit announcement: “During this time, Zest Labs’ proprietary information and trade secrets were shared with Walmart, including members of Walmart’s executive leadership team.”

In March of this year, Walmart announced its Eden technology. The company said it monitored food freshness, and was developed over a six month period, starting with a company hackathon. From a Walmart blog post announcing that technology: “Eden’s suite of apps helps Walmart associates better monitor and care for fresh fruits and vegetables that are waiting to be shipped from distribution centers to stores. That could mean more efficiently ripening bananas, predicting the shelf life of tomatoes while they’re still on the vine, or prioritizing the flow of green grocery items from the back of the store to the shelf.”

Part of Walmart’s approach, the company told Business Insider at the time, was the use of tracking devices on cases of produce.

Zest believes similarities between the two are not coincidental. Again, from the Zest Labs lawsuit announcement:

“This concern led to the action we have taken today, which was to file a lawsuit with the federal district court in Arkansas claiming that Walmart has violated the Arkansas Trade Secrets Act and the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act. In addition, we are also filing claims for unfair competition, unjust enrichment, breach of the covenant of good faith and fair dealing, conversion and fraud. We believe strongly in the need to protect our intellectual property, recognizing the importance of preserving the value to our shareholders and customers. We are asking the court for over $2 billion in damages, based in part on Walmart’s claim in their March 1, 2018 announcement that Eden will provide that measure of benefit to Walmart over the next five years.”

The grocery sector is ripe (sorry) with competition. Giants like Walmart, Amazon, Kroger and more are fighting each other for your food dollars. Any edge in reducing costs from food waste or extending shelf life of produce is worth a lot of money to companies at that scale. Just last month, Costco started using Zest’s technology for its produce. And elsewhere in the fight against food waste, yesterday Apeel raised $70 million for its plant-based peels that prevent food degradation.

For those wanting more information on the lawsuit, the case is Zest Labs, Inc., et. al. v Walmart, Inc., case number 4:18-cv-500-JM, in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas, Western Division.