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Stored Product Pest Detection

About Ecolab:

A trusted partner at more than one million customer locations, Ecolab is the global leader in water, hygiene and energy technologies and services that protect people and vital resources. With 2017 sales of $14 billion and 48,000 associates, Ecolab delivers comprehensive solutions and on-site service to promote safe food, maintain clean environments, optimize water and energy use and improve operational efficiencies for customers in the food, healthcare, energy, hospitality and industrial markets in more than 170 countries around the world.

Open Innovation Challenge:

Looking for technology that can detect or predict the presence of stored product pests in food ingredients or their packaging prior to intake at food processing facilities.

Reason for Seeking External Innovation Partnership:

Pest elimination services coupled with cleaning & sanitation programs go a long way in ensuring food quality and safety for food processing and manufacturing customers.  However, pests can be introduced into food processing facilities through stored foods or their packaging/delivery mechanisms and can carry pathogens such as Salmonella, Listeria, E coli., causing major food safety hazards.

Today’s pest programs rely too heavily on manually-based, visual inspection of deliveries and inventory in the warehouse and use of pest traps across a facility.  With these methods, it is difficult to know with precision when stored product pests were attracted to the device.  Furthermore, placement of traps is based too much on logistical and budgetary considerations rather than strategic rationale.

We believe that Identifying and proactively treating pest issues before materials / food ingredients even enter the food plant could move the needle in the macro problem of food waste. Several studies and industry reports have estimated that up to 25% of the food produced goes to waste before it gets to the consumer. This represents an industry cost upwards of $1.2B

Scope of Solution Space:

  • Technology must be capable of being deployed for real-time/near real-time detection on-site at food processing facilities.
  • Technology should ideally be deployable within 3 years.

Innovation Solutions Not of Interest:

  • Confidential information

Proposal Response Date Deadline:

April 30, 2019

Contact:

openinnovation@auri.org

 

To submit your proposal online, click the link below:

Open Innovation Submission Form

To submit your proposal in a PDF document, click here.