A piece of equipment called a spectrometer can provide information on the nutritional value and caloric content of a single food item, such as an apple. It works by shining infrared light onto the food item and by measuring how that light is absorbed by the chemicals inside, it can identify the food's molecular composition. Target, the US discount retailer has recently shifted focus to selling groceries, and is testing the equipment as it explores how much of a competitive edge it can get from being transparent about food.
Together with the MIT Media Lab and Ideo, a Boston-based design firm, Target launched the Food + Future coLab, a project focused on finding more innovative ways to produce and present food.
Earlier this year, a group of scientists, engineers, designers and even a farmer or two started brainstorming ideas to change how we buy what we eat. Target’s lead person at the lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts is Greg Shewmaker and he says the connective tissue among all the percolating ideas is giving consumers more options.
The Food + Future team liked the idea of using technology to make food shopping more personable. What if shoppers could use the spectrometer to see just how nutritious each strawberry or avocado was before they tossed it in a bag? And what if the price of each one was determined by the results?
“We could price produce based on the nutritional weight of the item and offer a discount for produce with lower nutritional value,” Shewmaker explains. The lab has started to test this idea.
Food fingerprints
By itself, the spectrometer data from one apple doesn’t mean much. It needs to be plotted against the range of all the variations within many, many apples. In other words, there needs to be a huge apple database, and from that, a match can be made.
So, Target has begun the laborious process of building those food databases. In the past few weeks, according to Shewmaker, the company has scanned “hundreds of thousands” of pieces of produce at its distribution centers in Florida and Iowa.
Shewmaker says it’s still early to say how Target will scale up its use of spectrometers, but it has developed a prototype, which it just made available to shoppers at one of its Boston stores.
