DMI announced April 20 that it is continuing its work with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to incorporate enhancements and customer feedback into The FoodKeeper, a premier mobile app developed by DMI for the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS). The mobile app, which has more than 100,000 downloads is available for Android and Apple devices. Several enhancements of the FoodKeeper App will be available in late May and August of 2016.
“Earth Day provides us with an opportunity to reflect upon and reconsider our global footprint,” DMI founder and CEO Jay Sunny Bajaj said. “One way we can do this is to become more aware of food waste and foodborne illness. We are extremely pleased to continue our work with the USDA to enhance the FoodKeeper App, delivering food-handling procedures through enhanced public education and outreach. This project is another example of our ongoing commitment to help our enterprise and government clients reinvent their businesses and mission through innovative technologies and services.”
FoodKeeper Enhancements planned for future releases to include:
- Access to hotline – Allows users to directly call USDA Meat and Poultry hotline or submit a question.
- Multi-lingual support – Provides Spanish version of the app, allows users to set app to display in Spanish or English and switch language through App Settings or Device Settings menu.
- Display measurements in Imperial or Metric format – Allows users to configure app to display measurements in desired format.
- Enhancement of calendar events – Improves existing event calendar capabilities.
- General cooking information – Provides more in-depth information about various food safety topics.
- Educational alerts and food recall push notifications – New option to provide push notifications of recalls and pop-up educational alerts to create awareness.
- Easy access to educational videos – Provides users with a list of educational videos that can play within the app.
Ahead of Earth Day, the USDA estimates that the leading 15 food-borne pathogens cost the U.S. economy more than $15 billion dollars annually, because of an estimated 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths, according to its Economic Research Service (ERS) report. What’s more, the report estimates that 133 billion pounds of food in the available food supply goes uneaten each year. The estimated retail value of this food loss is $161 billion.
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