I-Challenge: Prevent Food Waste by easy Shelf-life Prediction
(23-02-2024) Food is too precious to waste because of a wrong expiration date. I-Challenge, a spin-off of UGent, uses the knowledge of spoilage organisms to combat this food waste.
I-Challenge determines much more accurate expiration dates of food
Have you ever experienced it?
- A pre-packaged meal with mold on it, but not expired yet?
- Food in your pantry, days or weeks after the expiration date but still perfectly edible?
Worldwide, we waste one third of all available food, while an estimated 700 million people are faced with hunger.
I-Challenge has various innovative tools that help food producers to determine the expiration dates more accurately. The technology of I-Challenge can also be used to make food production more efficient, which again avoids food waste.
“The shelf life of products is currently determined by classic shelf life tests, a time-consuming and inefficient method.” says I-Challenge Co-founder Professor Frank Devlieghere (UGent).
The professor is an expert in food preservation and brings the knowledge of his research group to the market with this spin-off.
That’s where I-Challenge focuses on. The spin-off uses the knowledge of spoilage organisms; molds, yeasts and bacteria responsible for food spoilage, to determine the shelf life. Companies can use the I-Challenge test kits themselves or can rely on the laboratories of I-Challenge to determine shelf life accurately.
“With I-Challenge we can determine the shelf life of a product with 1 test; to achieve the same reliability with the classic method, you would quickly have to follow up 2000 samples. No company can perform so many shelf life tests, which is why problems with shelf life are sometimes noticed too late, our tests provide a great added value here”.
Furthermore, I-Challenge offers software that can predict the shelf life of food, food producers can use this to determine the shelf life of their products before they are produced. I-Challenge supports innovation and sustainability of food production in this way and fights food waste.
More info: https://i-challenge.be/
Interview with Professor Frank Devlieghere on the (Flemish) radio: link here (in Dutch)
Contact
Professor Frank Devlieghere: Scientific Advisor & Co-Founder
Tel: +32 477 46 91 19
Wendy Ossieur: CEO & Co-Founder
+32 495 66 46 10