With so much of talk around us of blockchains, and the excitement around it, transparency from farm to plate is much the buzz around us. But, putting the information on a central system and making that system accessible to everyone that requires it is harder than it sounds. Foods around us usually don’t allow us to track them till its origin. How many miles does the food travel before it reaches your plate?
Index Biosystems has formed digital tags by the use of baker’s yeast which would be tagged to the food itself. These tags, or known as BioTag, is yeast mixed with some water, and then sprayed or misted onto products like wheat. These incredibly sticky products remain attached even after undergoing processes like milling. This then invisible barcode can then be read using molecular detection technique like PCR and DNA sequencing.
In 2020, Harvard researchers also wrote about which would be a sort of microbial spore system which would track origin in under an hour. It would sustain to about three months, and at various stages of the supply chain. In 2019, SafeTraces announced a patent of DNA strands taken from seaweed that would be crafted into readable DNA barcodes.
TuDelft is another such institute currently working on bringing this fascinating advance to life. One of its running projects work on printing a barcode so small, so miniscule yet a physical one that would be printed on the food/medicine instead of the food package. It would be a product combining technologies such as microfluidics, lithography, magnetic trapping and others. When such advanced technologies are put into place, it becomes quite difficult for counterfeit products to be generated. It could also be taken a step ahead by providing storage information to consumers by usage of indicator-functional hydrogel systems.
In one more experiment by the Osaka University, the bar code on the cookie was made from the cookie itself thereby not hampering its color or taste. This was easily visible using a backlight. In addition to the food safety and traceability benefits, it also served the purpose of reducing food and packaging waste.
Back in 2018 in another part of the world, researchers in the US and South Korea had worked their way into an edible code, using genetically modified silkworms. Yes, you heard it right. It’s a nearly invisible code, which could relieve us from the headache of counterfeit products by just a quick scan through your smartphone. This technology was the product of genius work by biomedical engineers from Purdue University and the National Institute of Agricultural Sciences in South Korea. The principal investigator, Dr. Young Kim has been long working on anti-counterfeit solutions, and this product is an added chain to a long list of solutions he has worked for. The code consists of a pattern of fluorescent silk proteins. It is practically invisible to the human eye but can be scanned through a smartphone. It could be affixed on the solid tablet, or also tagged into a bottle of liquid medicine. How this would differ from the current practice is that this would associate the tag with an individual dose, rather than the entire packaging, which would make the tampering of products quite difficult.
The silk proteins used for this technology were processed from genetically modified silkworms. These proteins could then be arranged into proteins to encode the required information. These genetic modifications allowed it to produce silk with distinct fluorescent colorifications mainly cyanide, green and red. A matrix code – a checkerboard kind of pattern made up of little squares of these silks encoded the said information. More colours allowed a better way to encode. Why silk? They are one of the most bio-compatible products in nature. They are safe to eat and digest by humans, they are also versatile to be made into different shapes and patterns. This product was originally meant to be used for medicines, to protect drugs from being counterfeited.
Not just medicines, alcohol too is at risk from being counterfeited. During their study, they also wanted to work with liquid medicines as current anti-counterfeit technologies for them were quite limited. Since the liquid medicines were quite high in alcohol content, the scientists tested these codes out by introducing them in all brands of 40% alcohol by volume over a period of 10 months, and astonishingly found them still getting activated.
Edible Barcode – Would you eat it? A world fast advancing towards blockchain transparency, edible barcode would soon become inevitable, wouldn’t it?
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