Reducing Supermarket Food Waste

Products with a barcode would be priced dynamically, by software, using an algorithm which decrements the price as time remaining until expiration nears. Obviously, shoppers on a tight budget would be more likely to buy the older foods so as to save money. One possible solution for price display would be wirelessly updated digital price tags, which include a given product’s minimum and maximum price, and the time between the two. There would also be barcode scanners mounted near each product type, so that customers could look up the actual current price for a particular item.

Dynamic pricing of non barcoded items, such as produce, would only be possible if there was devised an instrument which could determine the ages of all varieties of fruit and vegetable. Then customers could check prices by pointing the detector head of the device at a particular fruit or vegetable, to see and hear the current price, and the same process would occur at checkout by the checker person, or self checkout machine. Such a device would have had to learn the decay cycle of all the various produce sold by the store. Perhaps there are emitted predictable ratios of particular gas molecules as a specific kind of produce ages. So the machine would “smell” the degree of rotteness of the apple, orange, banana, etc., and alter its price based upon a prefigured rate, programmatically implemented.