An 11-year-old girl has designed a fruit bowl that alerts you when the food inside it is about to expire in a bid to reduce food waste.
Rumaan Malik from Lincolnshire won Ocado’s Food Waste Challenge award, organised in conjunction with design website Little Inventors. Her device, the Alarm Cup, will now be turned into a household product by a major independent food retailer, The Independent reported.
Malik’s invention is fitted with an alrm that sounds when the fruit or other food inside has two days left before it expires. The bowl features a mini touchscreen display with icons and alerts for different products and recipes that help to combat food waste, such as apple crumble and banana bread.
The young inventor told the news site: 'I started thinking about what we throw away at home and what would help us stop this happening. Apples are my favourite fruit, but they were always going all soft when my mum left them out in the fruit bowl and forgot about them.
'That’s when I thought of my idea and started drawing the Alarm Cup. I thought that we all need something that could help us use up our fruit by sounding an alarm before it goes off, instead of letting it end up in the bin.”
Helen White, special advisor on household food waste at Wrap, added: “We were particularly impressed by Rumaan’s invention as it addresses one of the key issues behind food waste: behavioural patterns.
“The process of buying food without paying attention to expiry dates, leading to their disposal, is something we’re all guilty of from time to time, and it has become a habit for many.
“The Alarm Cup challenges this, disrupting the pattern and helping people unlearn the subconscious behaviours that cause household food waste.”
