I’ve seen the funky commercials, and heard of its wonders from Ben, but an article in Twist Image is what really opened my eyes to the awesomeness of the iPhone; and how just one of the applications could be used in food safety communication.

 Scan the barcode of any product in any store using your mobile phone and you can find out what people say about it, where you can get it cheapest, or you can even order it online right from your phone.

What kind of technology drives this? It must be some serious photo recognition software? This is all SnapTell says about it on their website:
"SnapTell has created core patent pending proprietary technology for image matching that works with databases of millions of images. Our technology works effectively on pictures taken with any camera phone in the world, including ones that have VGA cameras or relatively low resolution (320×240) cameras. Also, our robust matching engine can handle pictures taken in real life conditions that may have lighting artifacts, focus/motion blur, perspective distortion and partial coverage. The technology works in a wide variety of real life scenarios including print advertisements, outdoor billboards, brand logos, product packaging, branded cans, bottles and wine labels."

Regardless of how it’s done, there is no doubt that this adds many new and fascinating layers both to marketing and the in-store retail experience.

Now that’s cool. But how much cooler would it be if consumers could also receive food safety information regarding a product? During the peanut butter recall, instead of scanning the FDA list of recalled peanut products, what if consumers could have snapped a picture using a cell phone and receive up to date information on whether a certain granola bar was recalled? The iPhone has an application with restaurant take-out options, but what if the SnapTell application allowed users to snap a picture of a restaurant and instantly receive the latest inspection score?

Technology is changing the way consumers send and receive food safety information, from using cell phones to take pictures of mice in grocery stores, to reading barfblog. Using the latest technology to communicate food safety and recall information can benefit everyone. It allows consumers to instantly receive the information they desire, and in the recall example, could allow grocery stores to be certain they have pulled recalled product from store shelves.

Though the SnapTell application is currently only available for iPhone (as far as I know), I’m sure similar functions will appear on other phones soon, and hopefully someone will create an application to satisfy consumer food safety needs.