Japan testing sandwiches that discount themselves as they age Japan will conduct a test of sandwiches and other snacks that discount themselves as they age. Trials due to run in two convenience stores starting next week will see RFID tags attached to perishable snacks such as sandwiches, rice balls and lunch sets. The RFID tags will be encoded with information including expiration dates …
More electrical and plastic waste, in order to reduce biodegradable waste? Sounds brilliant! /sarcasm
I worked on a project to tag all carcases passing through the slaughter house and then on to the processing plant, to ensure the quality and to aid in traceability. But the project failed, because it wasn't economical to put a tag on each carcase half. They kept their reusable RFID tags in the meat hooks for tracking. If it isn't economical to put the tags on 40Kg of meat, I don't see it being economical to put it on a few grams of sandwich, unless they are re-using the chips in some sort of tray?
The story is missing some information.
Where I'm based supermarkets already put rfid tags on wedges of brie cheese sold for under 2€ to stop shoplifting, so the cost must be negligible
Also 2-3 years ago I read about a study being done about putting rfid tags in stamps to help the post office lose less parcels
As technologies gain traction costs go down
Passive tags are starting around 8p ish if you buy in lots of a 1000. The pricing you are going to get as a major supermarket is going to be prices in the 100,000s or so i would expect.
So rough assumption maybe 3-5p a tag.
Offset cost is, staff not being repurposed to wander store sorting out the bargains and moving them, or looking for out of date stock to remove. Plus you will get people buying into your app. Economically and operations wise it holds up.
This all sounds very environmentally unfriendly, both in terms of energy use and throwing away a RFID chip every time you dispose of your plastic sandwich box (also very environmentally unfriendly). If supermarkets find they have 15 unsold sarnies left at the end of every day, their stock control systems should be good enough to spot this and just order 15 less in future. This stupid Ecobuy scheme sounds like a novelty gimmick thought up by somebody with far too much spare time.
> both in terms of energy use and throwing away a RFID chip every time you
No extra energy use over the checkout system that is already used.
Environmental cost of an RFID chip could be very small compared to the potentially wasted food.
They should be fitting strain gauges to the sandwiches to see how far they've curled, and only when they've curled sufficiently should they be reduced in price. I'm sure it's not so straight forward as mere time-since-building the sandwich.
A commentator earlier pointed out the costs of the chips: the glass-encased medically sterile chips that go into pets are cents each when bought in bulk; I would guess they'll be cheaper in the chip'n'coil on sticky tape format. In the UK alone, we purchase four billion sarnies a year (at an average cost of just over a couple of quid)... that's a big market just in the UK; perhaps ten or twenty times that in the US and Western Europe? I can't even begin to guess for the Far East but someone obviously thinks it's worth doing.
So as all these are 'hygienically' wrapped in their little paper, card, and plastic film coffins which have to be disposed of whether the sandwich is eaten by a human or not, I suspect that the makers don't care about the additional electronic waste of these chips. Of course, we could have some sort of just in time delivery system, say, someone behind a counter with all the necessary ingredients to hand and no unrecyclable plastic in the packaging. I'm sure I used to buy sandwiches that way, years ago... I wonder what happened to it?
Nothing happened to it. At least not here in America.
In fact, there's less plastic in sandwich packaging now than there was 30 years ago. You're going to get a sandwich wrapped in paper or on a plate virtually everywhere. You may get a drink in plastic, but not a sandwich.
Much is made of how horrible our fast food is (and a lot of that isn't wrong), but at least the sandwiches are made when you order them. I'm not even sure where I'd find a pre-made packaged sandwich if I wanted one.
I think this is clever. As it stands here, you used to have food just sit on the shelf until it's at the "sell by" date then either a) go to a food bank or b) nobody at the store rotates stock and it stays on the shelf (they're supposed to, but I was in New Orleans a few years back, this grocery store I was at still had pre-hurricane-Katrina stuff on the shelf, it was like 5+ years past it's sell-by date. Gross!). More recently, they seem to have pushed those "sell by" dates right to the limit, bread will probably be moldy within a day of that sell by date and may well go straight to the trash.
They're smart about this kind of thing in Japan; for example, if there's an earthquake or similar disaster, the food/drinks vending machines will switch to "free vend"... this both keeps the food from spoiling (if power goes out, they won't refrigerate but have enough battery backup to vend their contents) and provides food and drink to people so there's somewhat less requirement for food aid if any area is hard hit.
Sell by dates, are not a indication of whether it will be ok to eat or not. its purely for the store for stock control.
There have been people who have opened canned food from the 1950s and it was still completely safe to eat. And I myself have eaten frozen burgers that are 2 years over their best before date and they still tasted good
Yes, Sell By, Best Before and Use By all have different meanings which may or may not mean the food might be unsafe after the specified date. In some case, Best Before or Sell By are only there because there is a requirement to have a date on it because the law says so. Canned goods, as you point out, could well be good for many, many years after the putative Best Before data printed on the can.
In 2002 a couple of pretty Nordic activists led me into a skip behind a supermarket to search for food. And there was lots of it. Very poor people always did this despite the social stigma, but environmental hipsters had started competing with them, albeit never taking more than they needed. Then supermarkets started taking measures to discourage it by fortifying their skips or stabbing and pouring blue dyed bleach on their food waste. Skipping became so common since 2008 that it's barely worthwhile. Some shops have started donating their "best before" food to homeless charities, which is kind of self-defeating as the homeless were the ones who knew exactly when it was being thrown out anyway, the same way slightly less poor folk know when food is put on the discounted shelves.
Also since 2008 and the collapse in council budgets there are a wheen more rats in the skips. I guess it beats eating your babies.
[For non British readers, this is quite tragi-comic. Footballer Marcus Rashford has asked the government to provide free school meals to children throughout school holidays. Conservative MPs claimed the children would swap their food for drink and drugs. This BBC article should go without saying except we have a Tory majority parliament who have obviously always paid for their drugs in cash: Stockton food bank: 'Dealers don't swap drugs for a tin of beans'. They really don't!]
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