Insignia wins award for innovative labelling technology

Packaging Solutions

Insignia Technologies, a developer of labelling technology to detect when food is past its best, has won global recognition for its Freshtag product.

The Scottish company won a Gold award at the Dupont Awards for Packaging Innovation for the technology behind its Freshtag label. Freshtag is an innovative new time and temperature monitoring system that links together the entire supply chain from point of production through to restaurant/store, which ensures food is consumed at optimum freshness and can significantly reduce unnecessary food waste.

The label changes colour over a pre-set number of days at a specified temperature. The colour change speeds up if the temperature increases, allowing breaches of temperature to be highlighted. The low cost of the labels allows them to be used on individual items/cases of produce in shipments.

The Freshtag inspires good behaviour in the supply chain ensuring that correct temperatures are being maintained, so enhancing food safety and potentially allowing the customer to extend shelf life. The visual nature of the Freshtag also helps improve stock rotation to ensure the freshest product is available.

David Kilshaw, CEO of Insignia Technologies, said: ‘The winners were selected from nearly 150 companies spanning 24 countries by an independent panel, so it is an impressive achievement for Insignia.

‘It is a great endorsement to the potential of the technology we have developed. Reducing unnecessary food waste is one of the greatest economic and environmental challenges the world faces and the Freshtag technology should prove a valuable tool in helping to address this.’

Insignia, a spin off from Strathclyde University, specialises in smart pigment technology and has developed this range of time temperature indicators over several years.