A few days ago, LUMITECH Lighting Solution GmbH impressed the jury of this year’s Burgenland Innovation Award with its “SI luminaire” and received an award in the small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) category. This underscores LUMITECH’s role as one of the innovation leaders in the field of intelligent lighting solutions. The IMWF Institute for Management and Economic Research recently analyzed and evaluated a total of 1,900 Austrian industrial, service, and commercial companies and named LUMITECH Lighting Solution the winner in the field of lighting technology.
What is it all about?
In the food retail sector, efficiency is just as important as appealing product presentation. With its SI (Sensor Intelligence) luminaire, LUMITECH has developed a solution that combines both. The linear luminaire automatically detects shelf levels, spoiled goods, and the number of times products are accessed—made possible by visible light sensing and machine learning. The self-learning algorithm adapts to all types of goods: in the bread shelf, it ensures optimal refilling and adjusted baking processes, and in the fruit or meat section, it ensures early detection of spoiled products. This prevents empty shelves, uses energy efficiently, and ensures hygiene. All sensors are integrated into the compact luminaire; separate installation is not necessary. Power is supplied via 24-volt low voltage, and data communication runs wirelessly via ZigBee, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth, without any information having to leave the premises. This innovation enables supermarkets to increase efficiency, reduce food waste, and strengthen their brick-and-mortar stores in the long term.
What’s behind it?
The project “Reducing food waste through innovative lighting technologies” uses special lighting to keep fruit and vegetables fresh for longer in stores. The optimized light spectra inhibit germs and have a positive effect on ripening and aging (see below).
About the company:
For over 25 years, LUMITECH Lighting Solution GmbH has been synonymous with research and development in pioneering LED technology and the manufacture of innovative solutions, and has received numerous awards for its work. LUMITECH manufactures high-end components for customized lighting solutions worldwide: over 80 percent of its sales are generated through exports. The company employs 61 people in Jennersdorf, 15 of whom work in R&D. https://lumitech.at/
[Sources: Burgenland Economic Agency website & Lumitech homepage]
LED4foods: Reducing food waste through innovative lighting technologies
Project coordinator
JOANNEUM RESEARCH Forschungsgesellschaft mbH
Project partners
Graz University of Technology
Lumitech Lighting Solution GmbH
The project “Reducing food waste through innovative lighting technologies” – LED4foods takes an innovative approach to optimizing the product quality and freshness of fruit and vegetables on their way from harvest to consumer by illuminating these products in retail outlets with optimized light spectra that have germ-inhibiting or germicidal effects on the one hand and have a beneficial effect on the respiration, ripening, and aging processes of these products on the other.
A number of effects are known from the literature, but these still need to be verified for the specific application and conditions in stores. If it can be proven that lighting with optimized light spectra has a positive effect on product quality, this approach could contribute to reducing the massive amount of food waste and thus achieving the goals of a more sustainable and efficient use of food.
Modern light sources and components based on LED technology provide the basic technologies needed to generate virtually any spectral intensity distribution. The aim of this project proposal is to use reproducible test series under controlled conditions to demonstrate that product quality can be optimized in stores using special spectral light distributions. This will be done using established measurable parameters for the quality of fruit and vegetable products in comparison to reference conditions. To this end, a test environment will be developed and set up with which these test series and the specified measurement procedures can be implemented.
The interdisciplinary consortium brings together research partners from the fields of food chemistry and food quality with technological expertise in lighting and sensor technologies and the development of functional samples and prototypes to implement the planned activities. The central project result should be scientifically sound evidence that the product quality of fruit and vegetables can be improved through optimized lighting in the retail sector. These results are also to be published in an open-access peer-reviewed journal. The project application was initiated by the company and commercialization partner, which sees the project in question as a starting point for developing and marketing innovative shop lighting for the retail sector in the future.