FreshSense – Smart Sensor-Based Food Spoilage Detection

Inspiration

Food spoilage during storage is a major contributor to food waste, especially when deterioration begins before it becomes clearly visible. Farmers, vendors, and storage operators often rely on visual inspection, which may not provide an early warning.

This inspired us to develop FreshSense, a low-cost embedded system that can monitor environmental and gas-related changes around stored food and provide an early indication of possible spoilage.

How we built it

MQ-135 – detects changes in gases/VOCs associated with the storage environment. DHT11 – measures temperature and humidity. STM32 Nucleo – collects and processes sensor readings. Display/alert system – communicates the current freshness condition and provides an early warning when deterioration is detected.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was dealing with the variability of the MQ-135 sensor. Its response depends on environmental conditions, so simply choosing a fixed threshold would not be reliable for every food type or storage condition.

We therefore focused on the importance of baseline calibration, controlled data collection, and trend analysis.

Another challenge was combining multiple sensor parameters meaningfully. Temperature and humidity can influence both food deterioration and sensor behavior, so considering them alongside the gas response provides a more useful picture than relying on a single sensor.

We also had to consider practical embedded-system constraints such as sensor stabilization, ADC readings, noise, calibration, and real-time processing.

GOAL

FreshSense aims to demonstrate that affordable sensors and embedded intelligence can be used to create an accessible early-warning system for food spoilage.

Our long-term vision is to extend the prototype into a scalable monitoring system for storage environments, where multiple low-cost sensor nodes could continuously monitor food and provide timely warnings to help reduce avoidable food losses

Built With

• adc
• c
• dht11
• edge-ai
• embedded-systems
• food-spoilage-detection
• food-technology
• gas-sensors
• humidity-monitoring
• iot
• machine-learning
• mq-135
• real-time
• sensors
• stm32
• temperature-monitoring