Public Funding for Blakbear Ltd

Every year, the global agricultural industry produces 193.1m tonnes of meat, 140m tonnes of seafood and 132m tonnes of chicken for human consumption. This takes tremendous resources, due to supply chain inefficiencies, oversupply and a lack of standardised quality control protocol. Microbiology lab data is currently expensive and sparse, perpetuating one-size-fits-all and risk averse approaches to monitoring food freshness in the industry, resulting in excessive, avoidable food waste and carbon emissions. BlakBear is solving the cold-chain's waste problem with real-time food spoilage monitoring via a patented, prototyped TRL7 sensor technology. Our patent-pending paper-based electrical gas sensors (PEGS) are a highly sensitive, low-cost data capture technology, which measures food spoilage gases (Amines, CO2, VOCs). Sensors collect spoilage data digitally and transmit this to the Cloud. The corresponding BlakBear App allows users to understand food spoilage data in real-time and make decisions that impact the cold chain monitoring. This step change in sensing robustness will enable supply chains to use our sensors to inform decision-making, such as packaging type, the way to position and stack protein, chiller temperatures, rejection of shipments and eco-labelling. In this project BlakBear will collect spoilage data via a new and novel advanced sensor with high sensitivity to water-soluble spoilage gases including ammonia/trimethylamine/carbon dioxide to improve the accuracy of spoilage measurements and AI predictive spoilage modelling. In time our sensors will replace "best guess" microbiology testing processes, catalyse longer shelf-life and inform industry on cold-chain inefficiencies so that targeted improvements can be made. Removing cold chain inconsistencies will reduce the oversupply of fresh food that suppliers produce to compensate for waste. We believe this could save the UK food industry alone £1.1bn/year. This project is a natural stepping stone in sustainable supply chains, where crucial food quality parameters are automatically reported in real-time without human intervention.

BlakBear has developed patented food packaging sensors that detect spoilage biomarkers in animal protein. In this project we will develop a food freshness AI for the chicken supply chain, which will analyse food spoilage from farm-to-fork. This will be deployed to improve cold-chain processes for suppliers, processors, transporters and supermarkets.

The vision for SecQuAL is a secure, quality assured, digitally enabled food ecosystem that will reduce waste, improve decision-making and provide consumers with confidence in the food they purchase and consume. The next best thing since sliced bread! SecQuAL's key objective is to overhaul the food supply chain from farm to fork. SecQuAL addresses current bottlenecks and inefficient paper practices, enables remote regulatory oversight and compliance, provides quality assurance throughout all supply chain links, and enables smart decisions to be made to reduce food waste, reduce carbon emissions as a result of unnecessary transport, and increase consumer confidence in the food purchased and consumed. SecQuAL is innovative because it brings technology to the fore to modernise a complete food ecosystem. It will increase the number of digital technology companies providing solutions for manufacturing industries by bringing together an excellent consortium with partners spanning the full food ecosystem introducing digital technologies to modernise current practices. SecQuAL will simplify a complex industry.

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BlakBear have invented a novel paper-based printed electrical gas sensor (PEGS) that can detect food degradation by measuring the spoilage gases emitted by perishable foods like meat, fish and poultry. We will deploy our sensors in food-boxes to consumer households, to monitor and reduce unnecessary and avoidable food waste. Food waste is a major problem, both globally and in the UK. Over half of UK food waste is generated at home and 60% is deemed "avoidable". In 2015, UK households binned £13bn of food that could have been consumed, generating 19m tonnes of greenhouse gases (WRAP, 2015). There are multiple causes, but the major contributor is that consumers throw away 1/3 of food that is still edible based solely on use-by-dates, and consumers lose track of the perishable food in their fridge, discovering items "too late". Due to quarantine, the majority of the UK workforce is working from home, and subsequently consuming 3-meals a day in the household. By our estimates, this will increase potential food waste by 12-15% at a time of food shortages, due to a spike in demand. This project is a collaboration between BlakBear and OXO. We will distribute food-boxes to 50 households with our sensor incorporated. Over a 3-month period we will measure food waste in households using a digital scale, and test whether the BlakBear sensors' behavioural nudges change household behaviour. Through this project we aim to understand the effects of BlakBear sensors on food management and waste generation in the home. We will capture data on usage frequency, faults, sensitivity, efficiency, click-rate, time of day usage, and length of engagement. We will use this data to estimate the amount of food waste avoidance from high-value perishable food groups: meat, fish and poultry.

Food waste is a huge problem. In the UK alone we throw away 7.3 million tonnes of food each year. This equates to £13 billion. 4.4 million tonnes of this wasted food mountain was perfectly edible. Reducing food waste, without any compromise to the safety of food, is a major commitment at the Food Standards Agency. Heather Hancock, Chairman of the Food Standards Agency has recently welcomed the publication of guidance on setting product shelf life, and explaining what factors affect the expiry date of a food product. This intervention by the FSA indicates their support and receptiveness to initiatives which prevent safe food from going to waste. Sell-by dates indicate when the supermarket should remove the food from sale. Use-by dates are added to perishable foods such as meat and fish to indicate that the food needs to be eaten by this date, as it could prove harmful to health past this date. Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 covers the use of use-by dates. Most sell-by and use-by dates are based on the results of one-off laboratory bacteria tests and microbial modelling. The food industry has understandably adopted a fail-safe policy on product "life", due to the multiple variables on how the item will be handled through its life-cycle. There is no incumbent technology commercially available for measuring spoilage in food packaging, meaning that there are currently few technology-led solutions to tackle and reduce this problem. Given the fact that the UK sources 50% of its food from abroad, reducing food waste and managing resources more efficiently are of paramount importance for building a resilient food supply. BlakBear Ltd build new chemical sensors, electronics and software to help the world feel, understand and improve itself. In this project, we plan to develop ultra-low cost packaging sensors for fish and meat products, to reduce waste and prevent foodborne diseases arising from spoiled foods. The project consortium is made up of three partners: BlakBear Ltd (Business Lead), Imperial College (Academic) and Coveris Flexibles Gainsborough Ltd (Commercial Partner).

Traditional approaches to air quality monitoring involve networks of fixed measurement stations, which requires significant investment. For example, the Automatic Urban and Rural Network (AURN) has 175 sites across the UK. These monitoring stations are often located away from roadsides and major traffic congestion areas, which result in localised high concentrations of pollutants. Sparsely distributed around a city, these stations can provide accurate time-series data, but with limited spatial detail. This makes it highly challenging to determine the spatial distribution of air quality from the measured data, and so modelling approaches are used to calculate distribution of pollutants. Real-time continuous measurements from a large sensor networks would transform the process of determining distributions of pollutants and air quality levels, supporting these modelling approaches, and potentially even making them redundant. Deployment of low-cost sensors in significant numbers will enable detection of pollution hotspots, and will inform real-time pollution mitigation strategies. The technology that BlakBear is developing will enable precisely this.