600 million (about 1 in 10 people) in the world fall ill after consuming bacteria contaminated food. Of these, 420,000 people die, including 125 000 children under the age of 5 years. Worldwide approximately 1/3 of all food produced is lost or wasted, requiring cropland area the size of China and being responsible for 8% of all global Greenhouse Gas Emissions. In the EU, every year 88 million tonnes of food are wasted related with costs estimated to be 143 billion euros. FreshDetect GmbH aims to contribute to a solution of these problems with the first mobile handheld device developed for rapid determination of the microbiological quality of food (currently meat products). The FreshDetect device enables non-invasive microbiological testing without additional operational or maintenance costs. For the first time, the handheld allows hygiene monitoring through the complete meat production process and creates a new dimension of food safety. Moreover, the FreshDetect technology offers a so far unmatched level of food process control allowing an optimization of the food production and minimizing food waste.
The current determination of total microbial count in laboratories outlined by §64 of the LFGB (German Food and Feed Code) takes about 72 hours to properly determine contamination. This renders impossible any process control that is based on food contamination. The FreshDetect hand-held device needs only 5-10 sec. for the same process, is much less costly and does not need scientific trained operators or lab technician. Starting with pork meat and having analysed the top 10 food processing European countries, FreshDetect’s market potential is 284,000 devices with a market volume of € 3.5 billion. The target users are slaughterhouses, cutting plants, meat processing companies, retailers, wholesalers and butchers. The goal of the project is to bring our current prototype (TRL7) to business success with commercialization to these users.
