Tencent Digital (Wen Xin) According to the Reviewed website, for those who are allergic to gluten, eating a meal or eating in a newly opened restaurant means a real gamble. A startup company has introduced an easy-to-use gluten-testing tool that relieves gluten-allergic people from eating unfamiliar food.
The gluten detection tool called Nima is a rechargeable triangular device that fits into a bag or bag. Although it looks like magic, Nima uses traditional science - it just puts traditional science on a beautiful, smart "outer coat."
The Reviewed staff first heard of Nima about 2 years ago, and now this product has been developed and will soon be sold through retailers.
At the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle, Reviewed staff tested Nima. Nima company staff even conducted a live demonstration.
On the surface, users are very interested in Nima. Many users even tell the staff stories of unexpected allergens when they or family members eat in a restaurant or eat convenience foods.
Reviewed said that Nima's developers call it a sensor, which may lead people to mistakenly believe that detecting whether food contains gluten is simply to point it at the food. In fact, using Nima to detect food is more like using a pregnancy tester than a metal detector.
To detect the presence of gluten in food, the user must place the food equivalent to the size of the pea into a dedicated test container. The container uses an antibody-based detection technique to detect the presence of gluten in the food, and gluten activates the test strip outside the container in 2, 3 minutes.
Nima “reads†the test strip. If the gluten content in the food is less than 20ppm (one millionth), the external display will show a smiley face.
The dedicated container for testing is not reusable, and its price is about 5 US dollars (approximately RMB 33.7). A Nima representative said that they expect average users to test food 2-3 times a week.
A lot of attention has been given to Nima's user-friendly design and marketing efforts. There are already many other gluten detection tools on the market—such as EZ Gluten and Gluten Tenx—but Nima researchers say its tools are doing a better job of detecting gluten.
According to Review, a supporting application enables users to share test results, helping other gluten allergies to choose the right restaurant to eat.
The first-generation Nima will be available for sale later this year at a price of US$279 (approximately RMB1880), including dedicated test containers. Although Nima can only detect gluten, the company claims that sensors for detecting peanuts and milk will be available next year.
Source: Reviewed