Nearly one in four Americans suffers from food poisoning every year, with 76 million cases reported to the Centers for Disease Control. Of these, 325,000 people are hospitalized and 5,000 die.

Food Quality Sensor International, Inc. (FQSI, Inc.), a spin-off based on technology licensed from the world-renowned Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, originally the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, has developed, with funding from Navigator Technology Ventures (NTV) of Cambridge, Massachusetts, a revolutionary new smart label that senses spoilage in fresh meat and poultry products.

freshQ™ is a new stick-on freshness sensor label that is applied by the meat packer, distributor, or grocer to the outside of fresh wrapped meat and poultry packages and detects food-borne bacteriological levels right through the wrap. When the inside of the quality "Q" on the label is tangerine orange, the product is fresh. When the bacteria count in the package builds to a critical level, the orange turns to grey to indicate spoilage.

The introduction of freshQ™ is planned for the first quarter of 2006 by FQSI, Inc. of Lexington, Massachusetts. FQSI will be test marketing freshQ™ with Unified Western Grocers (Los Angeles, California), one of the leading independent grocery distributors in the U.S., and Premium Protein Products (Lincoln, Nebraska), producers of TrackedRight®, a leading organic and source-verified beef brand sold to domestic and overseas grocers. The company is also working with Hobart Corporation (Troy, Ohio), a food industry icon, as well as some of the nation's leading supermarket chains, meat and poultry processors, and university food science laboratories to bring this new product to market.

freshQ™ is made of food grade materials and is extremely economical, costing less than 1% of the total value of the average package of meat or poultry that it labels.

Marketing research indicates that over 95% of consumers would opt to purchase a product with a freshness indicator instead of a product without. "For the first time, packers, grocers, and consumers will have graphic evidence of the product's freshness at each step in the distribution system," said Marco Bonné, President and CEO of FQSI. "The food industry can now extend its quality control programs directly into home refrigerators to let consumers know when it is no longer safe to eat these products."

"The freshQ™ label will remove the skepticism which more than 40% of consumers have with the traditional 'consume by' code dating system," said Bonné.

FQSI is an advanced sensor technology company focused on development and commercialization of food freshness measurement devices for the food processing, food distribution, food service, and consumer retail markets. The company was founded in 2004, when The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc. inventors Dr. John Williams, Megan Owens, and team partnered with food industry executive Marco Bonné and Navigator Technology Ventures to commercialize the technology. FQSI's company headquarters and research laboratories are located in Lexington, Massachusetts.

NTV is an early-stage, technology venture capital firm that seeks to fund technology-rich start-ups and is a subsidiary of The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc. of Cambridge, Massachusetts and led by Alain Hanover and Rana K. Gupta.

Editorial Contact:
Marco Bonné
President & CEO
Food Quality Sensor International, Inc.
(781) 862-3710
MBonne@FQSInternational.com

Agency Contact:
Sherry Alpert
Sherry Alpert Corporate Communications
(781) 828-9415
Sherry@Alpert-PublicRelations.com