The war against food waste has a new weapon, and it comes in the form of a £99 fridge camera. Statistics from the waste advisory body Wrap show that the average British family throws away £700 worth of food every year. Among the most wasted are bagged salads, with Britons throwing out 40% of the salad they buy every year – equivalent to 37,000 tonnes, or 178 million bags. That’s a lot of waste.
The world’s first wireless fridge camera may be the solution to this, and it will be hitting shops this month throughout the UK, as part of a project to combat the amount of food that we throw out. The idea is that people will be able to check the contents of their fridge at any time – so if you pop out to the shops you can check if you really need that bag of spinach or whether there’s one lurking in the vegetable drawer.
This clever little camera, known as the ‘Smarter FridgeCam’, will take pictures to be sent to the user and the accompanying app will monitor use-by dates and send out automatic top-up reminders to buy things that you have nearly run out of, and, conveniently, it will fit in any fridge. Not only this, but it will encourage consumption of the items already in the fridge, suggesting recipes to use them in.
The device is produced by Smarter, founded in 2014 by young entrepreneur of the year Christian Lane. The company initially found that the average fridge is opened and closed 20 times a day, for a variety of reasons. The data that each FridgeCam gathers when scanning and tracking food items goes into Smarter’s shared consumer database. “Our platform gets smarter by learning from our customer network of FridgeCams,” said Lane. “It is similar to how Tesla automatically improves by constantly learning from all the cars on the road.”
We finally have a tool which can help us to combat food waste without any inconvenience – to the contrary, this cam seems to be the kitchen-mate we all need!
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