To stimulate innovation and help solve problems that concern European citizens, the European Commission sets challenges known as Horizon Prizes. The aim for the Horizon Prize for a Food Scanner was to create a mobile solution that analyses food composition quickly and efficiently.
Given the width and gravity of food-related health problems, the Horizon Prize cash reward was set at €1 million, to be split between the winner and the first and second runners-up. The winner and receiver of € 800 000, that’s us with our Food Scanner concept, was announced on Monday, 20 March 2017 during CeBIT, the Global Event for Digital Business. CeBIT is the only event in the world to present the digital transformation in its entirety.
Our winning solution is a novel spectral sensing platform, known as The Food Scanner. The solution concept comes with the world’s smallest near-infrared spectroscopic sensing module, making it both compact and highly reliable. Employing advanced algorithms, cloud-connectivity and a vast material library, the Food Scanner is able to detect the fat, protein, sugar and total energy content of food items at high accuracy. Our solution is designed to provide people with food-related health problems, such as obesity, diabetes, allergies or hypersensitivities with fast and relevant information about the food they consume and guidance for healthy living.
As a plug-and-play solution, The Food Scanner concept, complete with the spectrometric sensor, cloud platform, easy-to-use software and mobile app, is ready for OEMs to integrate into their own applications such as analysers, handheld instruments, even production lines