Laser Labels For Fruits And Veggies

Reported February 2010

PEACHTREE CITY, Ga. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- From spinach to tomatoes, contaminated produce has made headlines … and a lot of people sick. When this kind of problem is discovered, one of the challenges is finding the source of the contamination. Now the Food and Drug Administration is looking at new technology to help the produce industry track and trace the fruits and vegetables we eat, from the field to the produce aisle.

"850 people sick from tomatoes. 31 sick from tainted sprouts. Salmonella taints peppers." These are the headlines that have people wondering: how do we stay safe from what we can't see? One way is with sticky labels. They can track produce and help identify tainted fruits and veggies, but these little labels cause a lot of controversy.

"You like them or you don't," one consumer told Ivanhoe. "I don't like them."

"The lemons or the limes, they don't come off that easily," another shopper explained.

These stickers provide inventory and pricing information, but they don't always stay put.

"When you apply the sticker it can peel off, it can transfer and it's certainly not permanent," Greg Drouillard, a physicist at Laser Application Technologies in Peachtree City, Ga., said.

But physicist Drouillard says a new kind of label is. The system uses an infrared laser to etch a label onto any piece of produce, with information like the variety, price code, and where it was grown. In about 25 milliseconds, it creates a colorless label in the outer layer of the peel that won't rub off.

"As the product passes by the laser, analyzes that piece of fruit very quickly -- maybe 9 nanoseconds -- it's checking that surface and it's applying the laser so it's removing pigment it's not adding anything," Drouillard explained.

The laser actually seals the peel so that the new label doesn't expose the produce. Some companies add a natural food dye to make the label more visible.

Identifying and tracking produce from the packing house, to the supermarket, it's technology to help ensure we know what we're buying and where it came from.

So far the laser labeling system has been found to be safe and relatively tamper-free. Sunkist has purchased the rights to it for their citrus products. Since September 11, 2001, the federal government has encouraged food companies to provide better ways to track and trace their products to protect them from tampering and contamination during the distribution process.

The Optical Society of America and the American Physical Society contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Greg Drouillard
(909) 782-6282
gdrouillard@hotmail.com
gdrouillard@sunkistgrowers.com

Optical Society of America
Washington, DC 20036-1023
(202) 223-8130
http://www.osa.org
info@osa.org

James Riordon, Media Relations
American Physical Society
College Park, MD
(301) 209-3238
http://www.aps.org
Riordon@aps.org

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