In September, 22-year-old Solveiga Pakstaite won the national leg of the James Dyson award for a tiny yet remarkable design that was only ever meant to be her final major project at university.
The product? Bump Mark: a super-smart, super-simple, gelatin-filled expiry label for food packaging, designed primarily for visually impaired people to feel when their food has gone off, but with the added universal benefit of being significantly more accurate than the dates currently printed on food packaging.
Small and triangular in design, the bio-reactive Bump Mark is designed to be stuck on to packaging at the time the food is packaged.
If the label feels smooth, your food is fresh — but if it feels bumpy, then it is better off in the trash can.
Bump Mark is made up of four layers: A bumpy sheet of plastic is covered by a squidgy layer of gelatin and sandwiched between two sealing layers of plastic film.
Gelatin, being a natural substance, reacts to factors such as temperature, oxygen and sunlight in the same way as food, and if attached to fresh food as a sealed label, it mimics the food’s process of decay.
When the product inside the packaging is fresh, the gelatin in the label stays solid.
However, as the food starts to go off, the gelatin breaks down and becomes a liquid, making the bumpy layer beneath evident to anyone running their finger along the Bump Mark label.
The label’s genius resides in its accuracy with any type of food.
“All you have to do is alter the concentration of the gelatin formula,” Pakstaite said.
“Say you wanted to put Bump Mark on a pack of strawberries, you’d measure how many days they’d last at the optimum temperature and match the gelatin formula so it would also last the same amount,” she said. “The more gelatin per water in the formula, the more bonds there are, so the longer it will take for the gelatin to break down. For items that don’t last as long, like meat and milk, you’d lessen the amount of gelatin in the formula.”
Pakstaite’s design has come along at the right time.
Food waste has become a concern in recent years and a sizeable portion of the thousands of tonnes of consumable food thrown out has been blamed on the often overly cautious “best before” and “use by” dates on food packagings.
“A lot of the solutions that retailers are being pushed to look at — and they are being pushed to look at solutions that will help people waste less food — are mostly electronic-based,” Pakstaite said.
“Some cost at best two pence [US$0.03] a label, which is very expensive. Bump Mark doesn’t contain any electronics, so it’s going to be far more low-cost,” she added.
Since winning the award, Pakstaite’s inbox has been overflowing with requests from companies large and small desperate to employ her design.
She has used her award money to apply for a patent (still pending), and last month, she ran a big retail trial with supermarket chain Asda.
If the results are good, it is very likely Bump Mark will be commercially available next year.
Pakstaite is passionate about her product and about the need for smarter food labeling.
“I’ve come from a family that does not waste food,” she said.
Born in Norway to Lithuanian parents who moved to England when she was five, Pakstaite, like many other recent graduates, is currently living with her parents and commutes to her job at a behavioral insight company in Shoreditch, London.
How has her family reacted to her success?
“They’re really proud,” she smiled. “I think my grandma’s told all of Lithuania about me.”
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