Smart Tags Indicate Freshness

When you go grocery shopping, do you ever wonder just how fresh the meat or fish in the display case really is? Sure, there are dates on the packages but they don't tell the whole story.

Now a few supermarkets around the country are trying something else: new high-tech freshness tags. CBS Consumer Correspondent Herb Weisbaum explains.

A date code can't tell you if the meat or fish has been left out of the cooler for a couple of hours so it can't guarantee freshness. But these new tell-the-truth smart tags will give you that information.

The Thrifty Foods store near Seattle relies on state-of-the-art technology when it comes to fresh fish. Each package gets its own freshness tag.

It's called a VITSAB tag and it's activated when the fish is wrapped. From then on it does what no ordinary label can do. It keeps track of time and monitors the temperature to make sure the fish is stored and displayed safely.

"[The] freshness date doesn't tell you if your refrigeration has broken down, doesn't tell you if the product has been held out of refrigeration for an extended period of time," says Kevin Weatherill of Brown & Cole Stores.

But the VITSAB tag does show that. When the green circle turns solid yellow, shoppers have a visual warning to avoid that package.

"I think it's a great idea," says one shopper.

A supermarket in Minneapolis is trying another type of freshness tag on the ground hamburger in the meat department. Cub Food stores in Minneapolis and St. Paul are the first in the country to use the new 3M Monitor Mark.

Like the other smart tags, the Monitor Mark is made from temperature-sensitive material that changes color over time. In this case, it is from off-white to black. When the center line is darker than the circle, there's a problem.

"We feel that we are delivering a product to the consumer that they can now follow from the time they leave the store until they use the product," says Jim Brekke, meat manager for Cub Foods.

Dr. Ted Labuza, a professor of food science at the University of Minnesota, developed the Monitor Mark. And he says it does a good job of mimicking what's happening to the meat.

"The color change in the tag goes on at the same rate that the bacteria that spoil the product go on. So at a low temperature, the bacteria are growing very slowly, so the tag changes very slowly," says Labuza.

The Monitor Mark goes on the package at the processing plant, ensuring that the meat is fresh when it arrives at the supermarket and that it's fresh when it goes into the cooler.

And that's important because perishables such as meat can go bad before they look bad.

To prove that point 3M's Rich Matner demonstrates with two packages of hamburger meat. He puts one in the frdge and leaves one out on the kitchen counter overnight.

"So you can see while the product left out looks pretty good and it's pretty cool, the indicator tells you that it's been left out," says Matner.

Once it turns color, it doesn't change back, he adds.

Cub Foods is just test marketing Monitor Mark. Customers can still choose ground meat without the freshness tag. But each week, the store says, more shoppers are reaching for packages with the Monitor Mark.

At the Trader Joe's chain of stores, there's one more type of freshness tag, a bright red Fresh-Check indicator.

If the experts are right, don't be surprised if in a couple of years these time/temperature freshness tags appear on all sorts of perishable foods such as meat, milk, fish, poultry, cheese - anything that could go bad if not kept at the right temperature.

These are freshness tags but not necessarily safety tags. Clearly a package of meat left in a warm trunk for several hours is going to grow bacteria that could make you sick. Smart tags could help reduce your chances of getting food poisoning but can't tell you if there's any harmful bacteria hiding inside that product. The meat could be contaminated with E. coli and the tags have no way of detecting that. So in that sense they're not safety tags.

What about the cost? These tags are really cheap. The stores running the tests with them right now are not increasing their prices.

If these tags do become the standard, the food industry will have to do a better job of handling perishable products. That could greatly reduce waste, which would help keep prices down.

For more information on the freshness tags, check out the following product Web sites:

• VITSAB
• Monitor Mark
• Fresh-Check

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