A 25 year old French student has won a €150,000 prize from the Ministry of Agriculture to develop a pesticide detector for fresh fruit and vegetables.
On average in conventional farming, a potato is treated with pesticides 18.9 times and an apple 35.1 times (fungicides, insecticides, herbicides etc) before being put on the shelves. Simon Bernard is in his final year at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure Maritime in the Havre and has come up with the idea for the “Scan Eat”, which can measure the amount of pesticides on produce in the supermarket.
The student says he had heard of an infrared spectrometer last year that has been made as small as a USB key and that he realised it could be used to detect pesticides in fresh produce. In 2014, the miniature infrared spectrometer was used by the Israelian start-up company, Consumer Physics, to develop “Scio”, a handheld device used to scan plants, food and medicine to know their molecular composition.
To use “Scan Eat”, users need to download an app onto their phone, then scan the fruit or vegetable with a device no bigger than a USB key. The molecular information appears as algorithms, which are then converted into pesticide levels that the smartphone users will understand. The student will develop these algorithms during a 9 month contract in one of the Ministry of Agriculture’s incubators.
If the technology developed by the student is successful, he could benefit from a second grant from the Minister, reaching up to €500,000.