London-based startup Mimica fights food waste with award-winning label
Food waste is a critical global issue and has become a growing concern in the food industry. It’s responsible for 10% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions and nearly 30% of the world's agricultural land produces food that ultimately goes uneaten.
Mimica, a UK-based startup, is rising to the challenge with its next-generation food expiry labelling.
Globally, one-third of all food produced is wasted. Around 60% of this discarded food is still perfectly edible, yet because of confusing and inaccurate expiration dates, 1.3 billion tonnes of food are thrown away every year.
Mimica, a UK-based startup, is rising to the challenge with its next-generation food expiry labelling. The company has developed innovative labels and caps that provide a real-time indication of a product's freshness, becoming bumpy when the product spoils. By taking the guesswork out of expiry dates, Mimica is setting a new standard for labelling while cutting down on waste and improving food safety across the supply chain.
What we're trying to do is try to disrupt the largest industry in the world, which is the food industry, and try to make people understand that reducing food waste is actually good for business.
Smarter labelling
To this day, expiry dates are set by each producer or retailer, with no standardised regulations in place. These dates are often based on worst-case scenarios that fail to consider the actual conditions in which food is stored. As a result, we get expiry dates that are shorter than necessary, causing perfectly good items to go unsold and wasted.
Mimica's caps and labels decay at the same rate as the food they're labelling, providing an accurate, real-time indication of freshness. Made with a temperature-sensitive bioresponsive gel, the labels become bumpy when the product spoils. This precise and consumer-friendly approach to labelling supports a more sustainable food system while tackling the highest priority in the food waste hierarchy: preventing it at the source.
Mimica has been recognised as one of London's 101 Fastest Growing Food and Beverage Startups by Best Startup London. Its growth and expansion have been bolstered through EIT Food's RisingFoodStars programme, in which it has participated since 2019 and received €227,749 in funding. This, alongside additional funding from EIT Food's COVID-19 Bridge Fund, has been allocated for consumer acceptability testing, product development, and market readiness.
The company started out being just me, but now we’re 12 people in different roles, bringing this technology to market.
Now an EIT Food partner, the startup has also received an additional €770,000 for the development of its flat-label version of Mimica Bump. With support from EIT Food, Mimica has adapted its technology to be universally compatible with various packaging formats, promoting its scale up to include a range of food groups.
In total, Mimica's solution could help prevent up to 29.99 million tonnes of food waste and save 125.95 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions per year. By adding just two extra days to a food product's shelf life, home waste is reduced by 63% and retail waste by 50%.
Learn more about Mimica’s startup journey on the Food Fight podcast:
Mimica's solution could annually help prevent up to
Adding two extra days to a food product's shelf life reduced
By the end of 2024, Mimica plans to complete extensive testing to scale up production. Currently, their Bump tag works on packaged perishable foods such as meat, fish and many others, while their Bump cap fits onto bottles of juice, smoothies and other drinks.
Looking ahead, the next phase involves refining the cap and labels for wider market adoption. The company is currently working to expand its technology to other products and services with limited shelf lives, exploring potential applications in sectors such as vaccines, blood and organ transportation, and cosmetics.
Learn more about the impact of the startups supported by EIT Food. If you are interested in the EIT Food Entrepreneurship programmes please email entrepeneurship@EITFood.eu.
If you also want to help transform our food system, get in touch.
