Driving food waste reduction by accelerating the scale up of Bump, a dynamic food spoilage label to deliver a Net Zero food system

One third of food produced globally is wasted, with catastrophic environmental impacts: if food waste were a country, it would be the third biggest greenhouse gas emitter after USA and China. Reducing food waste is therefore critical to achieving net-zero targets.

Most food thrown away is perfectly safe and edible, but providing accurate guidance around how long food can be stored is difficult. For high-risk foods e.g. meat and fish that can cause food poisoning if stored poorly/for too long, consumers rely on static date labels (use-by-dates) to determine when to discard food.

Use-by-dates cannot respond to real-world temperature mismanagement during transportation, retail, or consumer storage, so they are necessarily designed to be ultra-conservative. This leads to huge amounts of unnecessary food waste.

Our innovative 'Bump' technology provides a simple, effective solution to this problem. It's a responsive label that decays at the same rate as the food product on which it is placed. Once it has decayed past the food's safe consumption point, the label turns bumpy giving an easy to understand yes/no answer to the question "is this safe to eat?".

We've already successfully deployed our first product, Bump Cap, which is applied to juice bottle lids. We are now looking to launch our second product, Bump Tag, for use on packs of meat, fish and seafood.

Bump Tag will extend use-by-date (which it supplements, not replaces), saving millions of tonnes of edible food from landfill. If food storage is mismanaged, Bump will respond to this, providing an extra level of safety.

Bump Tag combines the highest level of food safety with the ability to dramatically reduce food waste in stores/homes: reducing overproduction, decreasing food prices, and reducing the agricultural environmental burden.

An ongoing project focuses on consumer usability, with a user-testing programme exploring the best graphic design and messaging to communicate Bump Tag's benefits. This will deliver an early stage prototype for the current project.

We are requesting this Innovation Loan to allow us to move Bump Tag to full production. The project will refine and optimise the physical design of the Tag and the production-line (so both Cap and Tag can be produced on the same line), and the method of attaching and activating the Tag on different foods. Funding will also support building of a full-scale finalised production-line, a critical step in fulfilling our vision of Bump becoming a global mark of freshness.