​From smashed avocado, guacamole or simply chopped into a salad. Avocados over the last year have seen a huge increase in sales as the superfood becomes a popular food trend. According to Tesco’s latest article, “the supermarket sold nearly 15 million more avocados than it did in the previous 52 weeks”.

But there's nothing worse than choosing an avocado that is not ripe enough to prepare it how you’d planned. Unavoidably, this leads to more and more food waste, and Tesco have thought of a way to tackle this once and for good.

Introducing Tesco’s avocado scanner, which uses infrared technology to assess the ripeness of the fruit in stores. The trial has been launched in a range of Extra and Superstores across the UK, and all shoppers need to do is hold it up against the scanner, and it does all the work for them, simply presenting them with an ‘immediately ready for smashing’ or ‘better used sliced in a salad’ alert.

Why does this matter in the food industry?

Food waste is a huge issue across the supply chain. As leading recruiters within the food industry, we are fully immersed in innovations like this, and sadly also the sheer volume of waste, due to strict quality regulations. By introducing technology such as the avocado scanner, it's great to see supermarkets committing to reducing food waste, ensuring fresh produce is purchased on the premise that you know its ripeness, and it will perform as an ingredient just the way you hoped.

This advancement makes me question the endless opportunities within the food and fresh produce sector that could become available. From agri-tech, data science, supply chain, operations, and product innovation, all of these roles become more advanced as food technology, such as this scanner, evolves.

Tesco’s trial is a small glimpse of the future, where we see technology, sustainability, and the consumer all come together. For companies across the food industry, this could mean new opportunities for specialist roles, all working to build a more sustainable world.