New Packaging Tray can Detect Food-borne Pathogens

“This is something that can benefit everyone,” says researcher Akansha Prasad, the co-lead author of a paper that describes the invention, published in the journal Advanced Materials (1^✔ ✔Trusted Source
Advancing in Situ Food Monitoring Through A Smart Lab-in-a-Package System Demonstrated by The Detection of Salmonella in Whole Chicken

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). “We’re hoping this technology will save lives, money and food waste.”

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“There is so much at stake with food safety,” says researcher Shadman Khan, co-lead author on the paper. “We wanted to develop a system that was reliable, quick, affordable and easy to use.”

The sloped sides of the tray direct juices to a sensor embedded in a window at the bottom. Without the need for any additional lab work, users can scan the underside of the sealed package with a cell phone and know immediately whether the food is contaminated.

How Does the New Food Packaging Tray Benefit Consumers?

Having easy, instant access to such information would allow public health authorities, producers and retailers to trace and isolate contamination quickly, reducing potentially serious infections while also cutting back significantly on food waste by identifying precisely which lots of food need to be recalled and destroyed, compared to today’s often broad recalls that end up wasting unspoiled foods.

Further, the researchers say, protecting consumers from contaminated foods will create significant health-care savings. Globally, there are about 600 million cases of food-borne illness every year, largely attributed to the consumption of pathogen-contaminated food products (2^✔ ✔Trusted Source
Food safety

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The McMaster researchers and their colleagues have been working for several years on related technologies, all aimed at creating simple, inexpensive tools to prevent and detect food contamination.

Their work is part of McMaster’s broader Global Nexus School for Pandemic Prevention & Response.

Co-author Tohid Didar, an associate professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering who holds the Canada Research Chair in Nano-biomaterials, says package-based sensors that measure other conditions such as humidity are already becoming common in Japan and elsewhere.

He said the McMaster research team on the Lab-in-a-Package project – featuring 11 colleagues from the fields of biomedical, mechanical and chemical engineering, medicine and biochemistry – has worked to make the new contamination sensor as adaptable and economical as possible, knowing food producers are under pressure to keep costs low.

“It’s really just a matter of time before technology like this becomes common all over the world,” Didar says. “Now that we’ve shown that one kind of food package can reveal contamination without even being opened, we can adapt it to other forms of packaging for other types of foods.”

Didar and his colleagues Yingfu Li, a professor of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences, and Carlos Filipe, McMaster’s Chair of Chemical Engineering, supervised the research.

“Being able to combine packaging and Salmonella detection in one system is already very promising,” says Li. “It also shows that we can add sensing probes for other food-borne pathogens to the same system so the package will check for all of them at once. That’s the next step for us, and we’re already working on it.”

The research has been supported by Toyota Tsusho Canada Inc., an indirect subsidiary of Toyota Tsusho Corporation in Japan.

References:

1. Advancing in Situ Food Monitoring Through A Smart Lab-in-a-Package System Demonstrated by The Detection of Salmonella in Whole Chicken – (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202302641)
2. Food safety – (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/food-safety)

Source: Newswise