Food Safety

From germination to table, IPD’s food safety products assure that food is compliant with government standards for temperature, time limit and other quality concerns. Using exclusively GRAS (generally recognized as safe), FDA-approved food additives to create temperature-sensitive, color-changing labels and food coatings, IPD enables food processors and restaurants to incorporate a food and food safety management system. To help the food industry optimize their compliance initiatives with applicable standards, IPD employs FDA-approved chemistry that intelligently indicates that the temperature or time limit has been reached or that appropriate moisture levels have been achieved.

For packaging safety, temperature-sensitive labels can be affixed to food packaging to provide a visual-only indicator of targeted temperatures, or they may be printed to obscure and deactivate a bar code. Applications include knowing when a frozen food item has thawed out, or knowing when a product has reached an elevated, critical temperature.

Time-temperature labels provide the added dimension of time indication. The chromogenic process can be controlled to produce a gradual color change over a predetermined period of time. The color change of the active ink is compared to a color-time reference stripe printed in close proximity, eliminating the possibility of discarding products that are still of good quality while mitigating against the chances of selling food that is potentially hazardous because of microbial proliferation.

Moisture-sensitive labels generate an intense color when sufficiently activated by water (vapor or liquid). One application for these moisture-sensitive labels is rice packaging.

Another coating can be printed directly onto meat products to make mock grill marks that appear when the surface of the meat has reached the target temperature. This ink is edible when keeping within the FDA's guidelines for proper concentrations.