Ugly food is food that does not meet ideal standards of beauty. A different shape, colour or size can lead to rejection by the retailer or consumer, resulting in the waste of fruit and vegetables that retain their qualities and are fit for consumption.

It is estimated that one third of the European Union's agricultural production is discarded for aesthetic reasons.

Behind this figure lies a huge waste of food and resources that could be reused. But how can the European ZeroW project help to solve this problem? To halve Food Loss & Waste (FLW) by 2030 and reach near-zero FLW by 2050, ZeroW living lab 5 (SILL5) will use machine vision technology in Andalusia, Spain.

Led by Corporación Tecnológica de Andalucía (CTA), Living Lab #5 also involves the Andalusian Institute of Agricultural and Fisheries Research and Training (IFAPA), a public entity, and the companies Grupo La Caña and Multiscan Technologies.

The aim of this living lab is to implement technologies based mainly on VIS-NIR (Near-infrared spectroscopy) technology to help reduce the waste of imperfect food by producers and retailers. The need to address this obstacle in the food supply chain arises from several negative factors identified by the ZeroW project when growing vegetables for retail sale.

Some of these factors are the late identification of imperfect foods, the lack of information on the shelf-life of these foods and their alternative opportunities, or the lengthy duration of certification analyses of organic samples, which can lead to problems in subsequent labelling and confusion among consumers.

ZeroW's Living Lab #5 is implementing a testing platform and trials in Grupo La Caña's facilities.

There, Multiscan Technologies is providing the necessary technology and CTA and IFAPA will be disseminate and extend the demonstration activities of this activity to the regional level.

As we have explained, the aim of ZeroW's living labs is to generate innovative tools and processes to reduce food waste throughout the food supply chain.

The multi-sensor platform of Living Lab #5 would have the capacity to analyse and process the state of around 300,000 fruits per hour. This is made possible by machine vision and a real-time data processing system which is also intended to be improved so that the data software module to monitor incoming products is more effective.

The process is as follows: tomatoes that are at an early stage enter the platform and are classified by quality and usefulness/shelf life applying non-destructive and multi-attribute analysis techniques. It allows the tomatoes to be classified into three groups.

In this way, the platform would be able to identify product defects early and estimate their shelf life in optimal conditions.

In addition to this innovative technology, Living Lab #5 is doing some trial with a portable mass spectrometer, i.e., a device that analyses the chemical compounds in tomatoes and identifies organic samples from non-organic ones.

NGSsensor is the company whose technicians went to Grupo La Caña's facilities to train in the use of the prototype sensor capable of detecting volatiles emitted by tomato samples, which will allow to avoid food waste due to incorrect identification of tomato batches.

Below, there is a picture of this process during the starting trials: