A British inventor, Paul Daines, has devised a system based on a hand scanner which could let supermarket shoppers scan the goods they want and see if they contain potentially harmful ingredients.

Up to 5% of children and 1-2% of adults suffer from food allergies, some of which can be fatal. Mr Daines himself has a milk allergy.

Food is normally labelled with descriptions of the ingredients, but labels can often be small and difficult to read, and manufacturers are not obliged to provide detailed information about anything that makes up less than 25% of their product.

Using Mr Daines' system, shoppers could provide their supermarket with a summary of their allergies, any additives they wished to avoid, religious prohibitions or other preferences.

They would be issued with a card containing the information, and when they went to a participating store they would be issued with a bar code reader.

One of the scanners shoppers could use

As they shopped, they would scan the bar codes of goods. The device would give the price of each item and information about the ingredients it contained, which it would compare with the customer's preferences stored on the card.

If the product could be dangerous, the scanner would transmit a warning. Checking out would also be faster, as all of their shopping would already have been scanned.

At the moment, supermarkets do not store information on the ingredients of foods in their databases for the scanners to access.

According to John Pellaumail at Symbol Technology, a company which makes hand scanners, supermarkets' key concerns would be the potential for litigation if there were an error or omission in their database and how they would keep the nutritional information up to date.

Mr Daines developed the product for Telxon, which does not yet have it in use in UK supermarkets.

Hand-held scanners are in use at around 200 British supermarkets to enable shoppers to check price information, but according to Pellaumail there is no technical reason they could not be adapted to include nutritional information as well.
 

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