New scanner recognizes foods at checkout

Japanese company, Toshiba, has developed a, so-called, food recognition technology. The new technology is a scanner which recognises the item of food, particularly fruits and vegetables, thus removing the need for barcodes.

Packages and labels can be crumpled so that the barcode can't be read at the check-out point. Furthermore fruit and vegetables in supermarkets don't usually have barcodes because they're put out while they're fresh, so these items can't be read at the register using barcodes, which means that either a shop assistant has to weigh, put in the correct data and label the product with a barcode or it is the cashier responsible for this job.