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Food Safety iPhone Apps: Living Goods

By Dan Flynn and Suzanna Schreck

iPhone applications have quite a bit to offer on the food front. If you're in St. Louis and you must know where the closest Filipino restaurant is, iWant, Urban Spoon, or Yelp applications can help you in a jiffy. You can also use iPhone apps to find an open table at a nearby restaurant, track calories and ingredients, or calculate your tip.

As more stories emerge about the complexities and risks of the globalizing and highly-processed food supply, more consumers are looking for ways to get information about the food on their plates. In the iPhone app marketplace there are a couple of promising apps to meet this growing demand.

In case you've missed it, over the past several weeks we've featured the best food safety-related iPhone applications: Breadcrumbs, HarvestMark, Food Watch New York, Locavore,  Good Guide, and Clean Eats.

A Guide to Food Safety iPhone Applications: Today's Featured App: Living Goods

Though local food is not necessarily safer--at least we haven't seen any robust data to prove it--locally sourced food does have a shorter supply chain, which, in theory, means fewer opportunities for contamination.

If a shorter supply chain is what you are after, Living Goods can help.

Augmented Living Goods, or AUG, is a conceptual mobile phone app, which was recently a finalist at the Greener Gadgets competition. AUG seeks to encourage the localization of produce, meat, and dairy products.

The application would allow consumers to scan product barcodes to find information on how far a food item has traveled, whether or not it's in season, and how the current price compares to past prices.

AUG's developers cite three reasons for buying local: reducing food's carbon footprint, increasing nutritional values, and strengthening local economies.

"We want to use emerging technology to create a useful and realistic system intended to inform, empower, and excite consumers while better connecting them to local producers," says the company on its website.

"At the moment, when you go to the grocery store, you are given limited information about where the products you buy come from."

Full post as published by Food Safety News on February 22, 2010 (boomark / email).