Perishable food products such as milk have a relatively short shelf life. However given that milk is considered by some to be a staple, finishing a carton before its expiration date is usually not an issue. However sometimes dates could be mislabeled, or maybe you’ve forgotten, or maybe that batch of milk you got was bad.How would you know? Obviously drinking it and finding out isn’t the smartest solution, which is why engineers from the University of California Berkeley and Taiwan’s National Chiao Tung University have worked together on creating a smart bottle cap. As the name implies, this is a bottle cap that will let the user know when the milk has gone bad.
It will rely on electrical components to be embedded into the 3D printed cap, such as resistors, inductors, capacitors, and etc. To test to see if the milk has gone bad, all users have to do is tilt the carton upside down to allow some of the milk to get into the cap, after which thanks to its circuitry, it will determine if the milk has indeed gone bad.
According to Liwei Lin, a senior author on the paper, “This 3D-printing technology could eventually make electronic circuits cheap enough to be added to packaging to provide food safety alerts for consumers. You could imagine a scenario where you can use your cellphone to check the freshness of food while it’s still on the store shelves.”
That being said we can only imagine it could prove to be expensive to manufacture so many caps of this variety, but as it stands it’s more of a proof-of-concept, but who knows, perhaps one day it will be made a reality.
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