Company develops food safety indicators for packaging
that will let buyers know whether food is fresh and safe to eat.
Tougher regulatory standards and the increased reporting of food contamination in restaurants, supermarkets and processing plants has pushed companies to put a higher priority on the safety, shelf life and cleanliness of their products. A visible sign of food freshness and safety could help a product gain consumers trust.
Toxin Alert's patented diagnostic tests are not out on the market yet. However the company said it is exploring development agreements with several food packaging products manufacturers. The company aims to leverage its patented technology into a commercialized food safety product.
The Canadian-based company's Toxin Guard is a system of placing antibody-based tests on polymer packaging films to detect pathogens or other selected micro organisms. The insert sends a visual alert when it encounters targeted spoilage bacteria, or pathogens such as E-coli, Listeria and Salmonella.
It will also alert consumers if chemicals such as those used for pesticides are present in a food. It would also be able to tell whether food is a result of genetic modification.
On 18 January the company announced that it had received a letter from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency stating that Toxin Guard has met all of the country's regulatory requirements for food packaging.
The letter enables Toxin Alert to produce home storage bags that are considered safe, and it allows packaging producers to safely use Toxin Guard on their printing and other equipment for development purposes and trial runs.
"It been a long process but we're finally getting to a point where we can commercialize Toxin Guard," stated Ted Petroff, the company's executive vice president. "Our next step is to seek approval from the Food and Drug Administration in the United States."
Toxin Alert plans to produce home storage bags with the freshness indicators in the US, and market them in Canada. The US department of defense is also testing Toxin Alert for use in bioterrorism prevention. The tests are being done in partnership with researchers at the University of Southern Mississippi.
"The applications for this technology are numerous and include rapid bioscreen of food supplies, rapid detection of airborne pathogens and bio-secure packaging," the university's president, Shelby Thames, stated. "We are pleased to be part of a multi-disciplinary research team of polymer scientists, biochemists, and biologists to address and solve issues related to low-cost, mass production of sensors embedded in polymer films."
Toxin Alert's says its technology can be inexpensively incorporated into conventional plastic food wrap and other kinds of packaging.
The system has been proven on commercial printing equipment running plastic food wrapping film at 250 feet per minute, with 144 tests per square foot, the company stated.
The shelf life has been tested at more than one year. The inserts are also stable through a wide temperature range, broader than that tolerated by conventional commercial food-packaging inks and substrates.
