Project:Food Rescue/Concept

Motivation

Food waste is a problem for society as a whole, with enormous consequential damage to the environment and the climate. Over 12 million tons of food are thrown away every year in Germany, more than half in households. A key factor is the best before date. If it is exceeded, many also throw away unspoiled food because of uncertainty. The MHD is an overly carefully chosen date of the industry, often even deception of the consumer: at the request of the customer, producers even provide products that are produced at the same time with different MHDs.

Unspoiled food needs a real chance of being eaten. This is not only climate protection and environmental protection, but ultimately also relevant for the global implementation of the human right to adequate nutrition. Because hunger is "only" a distribution problem.

Approach

The aim of the project is to develop a solution that can be used to build and strengthen consumer confidence in food regardless of the best-before date. Specifically, an application on mobile devices (“smartphone app”) should provide information quickly and conveniently about how long food can actually be kept and how its edibility can be reliably assessed. Consumer protection in the information age means rich information instead of a single date. Among other things, information on the normal behavior of food during storage and processing should be included. Their knowledge can often no longer be assumed as a prerequisite for consumers, since many of the more complex processes in domestic food processing (such as boiling down) have been displaced by industry.

Users access this information by reading the GTIN barcode on all food packaging into the application using the camera on their mobile device. This is convenient, fast and practical, and differs from the existing “Eat By Date” approach, where this information is presented on a website in the form of an encyclopedia.

The project is non-financially supported by the open source project "Open Food Facts" (openfoodfacts.org), which was founded in 2012. Open Food Facts has a mobile application for displaying data on food products, and also has a large community of relevant users, including: documented by over 500,000 installations of the Open Food Facts Android application. Specifically, the collaboration provides for the project to be implemented using additional functions from the existing Open Food Facts Android application. If necessary, implementation as a separate application with API connection to Open Food Facts is also possible.

In any case, users will have the opportunity to contribute and update information on the real shelf life of the food themselves. This prevents the database from becoming obsolete and corresponds to the way in which the existing Open Food Facts database is set up and maintained with information on nutrient content, ingredients, allergens, etc. All information is provided free of charge and under the same open licenses that are already used in the Open Food Facts project.

Producers and laboratories will also be able to contribute information. Whether the application will explicitly support the publication of warehouse tests depends on how readily manufacturers of food products sold in Germany will respond to requests to publish their warehouse tests. At this point it should be noted that a political requirement for the publication of such storage tests would significantly increase the benefits of the application described here. But even without such detailed data for individual products, very helpful information can already be offered at the level of the product categories (such as "fruit juice in a beverage carton").

Target group

The beneficiaries of the project are everyone who prepares food in private households and would be willing to use a mobile device (“smartphone” or “tablet”) - in other words, all citizens who already use such a device regularly and in a variety of ways.

In order to reach this group, the project is being implemented in cooperation with the Open Food Facts community. This is the world's largest open data community in the food sector and consists mainly of consumers. The central tool of this community is a free and open source Android application that has been installed more than 500,000 times. By integrating the program functions developed in the project there, all these users automatically receive these functions with the next update of their Android applications. It can be expected that many users of this application will discover the new functions during normal use of the application, since this functionality is visible immediately after barcode scanning on food packaging (and thus when using the main function of the application).

In addition, Fairdirect's public relations will actively draw attention to the Real MHD app, especially in Germany. Fairdirect (Fairdirect e.V. together with Fairdirect Services UG) has been committed to food waste for several years and has supplied the inspiration for this project.