Future Now
The IFTF Blog
A trail of breadcrumbs leads to food facts
IBM recently previewed a yet-to-be released iPhone app—Breadcrumbs—that will give consumers immediate access to information about food products while they shop. By scanning an item's barcode with your iPhone camera, you will be able to receive a summary of a product's ingredients and learn when it was manufactured (oh, at long last, to know how old that package of Ho-Hos really is!) Granted, ingredients are already listed on food labels, but recall information isn't, and according to this ReadWriteWeb post, Breadcrumbs will be able to put this kind of product history in the palm of your hand.
Breadcrumbs: Follow your food from farm to fork
We've been waiting to see the greater availability of apps like this, which turn a mobile device into a scanner or RFID reader and make information accessible like never before. A few years ago, a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley School of Information developed iBuyRight, which was intended to enable shoppers to purchase products aligned with their personal values by providing them with social and environmental information on-the-go.
iBuyRight—social and environmental product ratings
In 2006, McDonald's started printing QR codes on its food wrappers in Japan. Customers could use their cell phones to scan their Big Mac or Chicken McNuggets and immediately get nutritional information from the company's website. Here, you can access the mobile web and search for this information (or simply read it on the wrapper or posted signage), put that is not nearly as cool, nor as powerful, as being able to scan a bar or QR code.
McDonald's QR code reader
The tagline on the Breadcrumbs' display is "Follow your food from farm to fork." I'm curious to see whether the app really will deliver this breadth of information—where and when my food was grown and packaged (or manufactured), how far ir had to travel to get to my grocery store's shelf, and how long it has been sitting there.