The Galicia Food & Drink Cluster (Clusaga) leads the national collaborative project FoodTechINK, which has been selected in the last call of the national support programme for clusters (Agrupaciones Empresariales Innovadoras), convened by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Tourism. The project, which has been selected among 220 applications presented, involves an investment of 122000 EUR and will run until March 2022.

The overall objective of FoodTechINK is to analyse the industrial applicability of colorimetric indicators to monitor the freshness and quality of fresh packaged food. These colorimetric indicators are based on smart inks that are integrated into non-invasive smart-labels and provide real data on the quality of the fresh packaged product along the entire value chain.

Ultimately the project aims to advance in intelligent packaging systems for fresh packaged products that allow, in a non-invasive way, to monitor the quality of the product and minimise the waste rate of this type of food in the food sector.

This is being pursued through the following specific objectives:

• To establish the economic impact and main problems associated with the processing and performance of current quality controls for fresh packaged food along the value chain.
• To identify and characterise through literature and shelf-life tests the most relevant parameters that can determine the freshness of meat and fish, and that will be used for the preliminary prototyping of smart labels to determine the freshness of food.
• To characterise the cold chain and those factors with the greatest impact on the preservation of freshly packaged food, which will be used for the design of smart inks with the capacity to provide information on the cold chain itself.
• To establish the economic viability and scalability of the smart packaging technology based on colorimetric labels through a proof of concept carried out on a pilot line.

Clusaga coordinates this project, which involves also the Galicia Meat Technology Centre (CTC), and the companies ColorSensing S.L., Cofrico S.L. and Vegalsa-Eroski S.L.