Produced, paid for and written off

 More and more food retailers are striving to reduce their considerable food losses and the attendant write-offs. These days, Jürgen Engels, owner of an Edeka supermarket in Cologne, takes a somewhat different view of the challenges: “We always had a problem with a high rate of wastage on self-service sausage products in the chiller. The solution we were looking for ultimately came from our lighting experts,” says Engels enthusiastically. “Ansorg offered us a solution, which enabled us to reduce our wastage by 47 per cent – thanks simply to a better lighting system.” A partner in the battle against product write-offs is the lighting specialist Ansorg from Mülheim an der Ruhr, which investigated the phenomenon of greying sausage. The experts provide an LED lighting system that preserves the juicy, pinkish-red colour of the prepacked sausage for far longer than with conventional HIT lighting and current competitor products. This is most definitely a step in the right direction for the retail food industry.

The right light reduces write-offs on sausage products 
Prepacked meat products on self-service chiller shelves account for a not inconsiderable portion of the write-offs. “Sausage products in particular are very sensitive to certain wavelengths in the light, resulting in a product that is still fresh losing its delicious delicate pink colour and looking greyish. All customers have to go on when choosing a product from the chiller is its colour,” says Engels, talking from daily experience. However, the lighting specialists from Ansorg view their new product as potentially being able to do more than merely preserve the true colour of sausage products. “Our new Natural Meat light takes the next step that’s technically possible,” explains Ansorg product developer Bastian Urban. “By slowing down the greying process with the light, we don’t just almost halve the number of write-offs, but also enhance the display in the self-service chillers.” The light highlights the red of the meat. At the same time, the light itself is white, not pink any more, thus virtually ruling out the possibility of creating a false impression with the packaging. 

Success confirmed under laboratory conditions 
Fleischhof-Rasting GmbH has also noticed that some of their products displayed in Edeka supermarkets do not stay looking fresh for the same length of time. In order to find out why, Rasting conducted a scientific examination of the various LED lighting systems used in the different supermarkets. She was surprised by the span of results, says the woman heading the test team, Susanne Schüller: “There were differences of up to 60 per cent in the lighting systems we tested, and in the worst cases, that led to far faster discolouration. Only one manufacturer produced a light with which, under laboratory conditions, sausage products could be illuminated for a period of 12 hours without any visible discolouration.” Under the Meat light from test winner Ansorg, self-service sausage can remain on the shelf without visibly greying for four to five hours longer than otherwise. “With Meat, the tested forerunner to Natural Meat, we make a demonstrably significant contribution towards reducing wastage in this product group. But we will continue to work towards developing improvements on the product in the future,” says Urban, not without a little pride. 

The reasons for product wastage vary greatly from category to category. However, if every specialist involved comes up with such good solutions as Ansorg, the retail trade will soon reach its goal. And high time, too, because according to an EU Commission survey, every supermarket removes two full shopping trolleys of unsellable food from its shelves every day. The survey puts the monetary loss at approximately 150,000 euros per year and supermarket. So each individual preventive measure contributes to value creation.  

Infokasten 1:

The technology

Natural Meat from Ansorg works with a different light spectrum. 
Until now, the light used for meat and sausage products had less green in its rainbow spectrum, making the red wavelength more dominant and giving the light its typical pink tint. This in turn makes the meat look fresher. Ansorg’s Natural Meat light takes another approach. Here it’s the light wavelength that harms the meat most that is minimised. The blue wavelengths in the light contain the most energy and are therefore chiefly responsible for premature greying. What sounds so simple is actually the result of lengthy development work. It made it possible to shed a gentle light on meat and sausage products that also looks pleasantly white to the human eye. 

Info-Kasten 2:

The test

Fleischhof-Rasting GmbH tested various manufacturers’ meat lights. 
As a producer of meat and sausage products that are delivered to more than 1200 major clients every day, Rasting wanted to find out which light was the best for its wares. To do this, the meat producer compared six LED lighting systems from different manufacturers. In its scientific test, it exposed a sample sausage product to 1000 Lux over a period of 12 hours. The result is expressed by the a* - value, which rates the colour of sausage products. The appetising delicate pink of a sausage product earns it roughly 11.50 points. Experts immediately notice if the a* - value goes down by just a single point. Even the uninitiated notice a fall of two points. After half a day, the test sausage under Ansorg’s Meat light was the only one that still looked temptingly fresh. The Ansorg light is far and away the only light in the test beneath which a sausage product can preserve its fresh colour for a whole day on the supermarket shelf.