You might have picked up a strap to help your back, a smartwatch for your wrist, or the odd game or two through Kickstarter, but what about a plastic bag that claims to keep your food fresher for longer? That’s what Freshdy is, and it takes inspiration from the natural world to keep our fruits and vegetables fresher much more effectively than traditional plastic bags.
Freshdy is a multilayer, micro-perforated, flexible plastic bag that uses the multilayering of corn leaves and other podded vegetables and fruits for inspiration. The best material to mimic this is Biaxially Oriented Polypropylene (BOPP) plastic, with micro-perforated layers. When compared to standard plastic bags, they can maintain up to 79 percent more water within a fruit or vegetable over a 10-day period.
Clearly the bags work very well, but unfortunately right now they aren’t very cost-effective. While they have been found useful in industrial scenarios, we are a ways off them being an affordable option for consumers. That’s what the Kickstarter is about.
The problem there, though, is that you can’t actually get a Freshdy bag by backing the campaign. Instead what you are putting your dollars down for is information about food wastage. There’s an e-book about it and several print-at-home or pre-printed posters for your home and workplace.
All of the 188,000 New Zealand dollars that the creators of the campaign are hoping to get will go toward researching how to bring the cost down for the bags and make them more viable for consumers. As much as that’s a noble goal and one that makes a lot of sense for the company, it’s hard to see it really inspiring backers.
Indeed after a week of being online, the campaign has only garnered $2,500, which is a long way from its goal. This might end up being one that has to go back to the drawing board, or at least wait until the patent goes through officially and the price for consumer versions of the bags have gone way down.
