The Paper Way

Providing the growing world population with enough safe and nutritious food in a sustainable manner is one of the major challenges facing humanity today. The safety of our food, however, is currently under increasing pressure from a range of factors, such as climate change and dietary transformation, which can directly and indirectly affect the risk on food contaminations with substances such as pesticides and natural toxins. Yet conventional techniques for analysing these contaminants are often time-consuming, laboratory-bound, and expensive. To address these limitations, in this PhD-thesis, low-cost paper-based sensing technologies that enable food contaminant screening directly at the point-of-need have been developed. These technologies have been successfully tested at universities, research institutes, and companies across Europe and beyond, highlighting their potential to eventually help consumers, industry, and food safety authorities ensure safe, high-quality food for all!