Tracking food with your Cell Phone
by EcoGeek.org on 11.24.06
Food is a complex issue, and, frankly, food packaging is getting crowded. We need to tell where it came from, what it contains, the labor conditions of it's harvest, how it's going to taste, if it's good for us, and whether we're getting a good deal. Which is why I will now predict a future where our cell phones can scan a barcode, and tell us everything we'd ever want to know about a product.
Why am I so confident in my prediction? Well...uh...they're already doing it in Japan. After a breakout of Mad Cow in 2001, Japan's Food Safety Commission began to tag more and more foods with radio frequency or QR tags that contain information on the origin of foods. Almost all cell phones sold in Japan today contain QR code readers, and the Japanese Food Safety commission has already begun to notice preferential purchase of locally grown foods due to the QR tags. It turns out that knowing more about food actually results in buyers making better decisions...who'd have guessed!? Now I guess we're just going to have to wait for the rest of the world to catch up.
I want that...
Hopefully it'll happen in the USA... but here we have the FDA or Food Dummies of America.
I believe that a similar system is in place in some Danish grocers, but instead of using cell phone scanners, there are kiosks in the produce and deli areas where one can scan a product and then see information about where it was grown/raised, the day on which it was harvested/slaughtered, what the farm's pesticide/herbicide/antibiotic practices are, and considerably more.
It occurs to me, though, that in this scenario the grocer itself is compiling (or paying someone to compile) the data and presenting it as it sees fit. With the cellular phone scanning, I presume that the data screen that appears for each product is created by the producer, rather than any independent source.
Which is more reliable? Maybe we'd end up with the data being managed by the "Food Dummies of America," as Janet dubbed it in the first post, anyway.
Nice advertising!
I've heard that a few different variations of this have been introduced, but the business models haven't worked out to where the VCs wanted to jump in. One version even had temperature monitors to verify that perishables haven't gone into the wrong temperatures. It'll come eventually.
Oh please. Here's a blog that regularly dumps on ideas like this.
I have a bar Code scanner in my nokia n93 but a lack of cool stuff to scan with it lol :)