News in Brief

Labels that Go Straight on the Food Itself

A new labelling technology that prints a QR code directly onto food such as fruit has been developed by a team of researchers in South Korea, according to an announcement by the country’s Ministry of Science and ICT.

The research, led by Prof Rho Junsuk of the Pohang University of Science and Technology, is based on the use of metamaterials – artificially engineered materials that do not occur naturally in the environment.

Rho’s team developed a technology that creates a metasurface composed of nanometre-scale structures formed from water-soluble, environmentally friendly materials that are harmless to humans. This metasurface, which measures just 300nm in thickness, can be printed onto fruit or plastic containers in the form of a QR code.

The researchers explained that these metasurfaces cannot be detached and possess vivid structural colours, enabling the printing of characters even smaller than the microscopic text found on banknotes.