Arie Listyarini successfully earned a Doctorate in Materials Science from FMIPA UI through a doctoral promotion session held online on August 2, 2021, thanks to her innovative research results on food quality and safety monitoring sensors using natural dyes. The food safety sensor is an indicator label in the form of a sticker that is attached to the packaging. This innovation is claimed to be environmentally friendly and more effective in overcoming food security while preventing fraud from traders.
"Modern smart food packaging that can monitor food quality and safety is an important factor in modern commercial trade. Research is needed on the creation of environmentally friendly colorimetric labels that can simply indicate food freshness through color changes," said Arie to the FMIPA UI public relations team.
This indicator label consists of three colors, namely red, purple and yellow, each color indicating the level of food quality. The natural color on the sticker is produced from Ruellia simplex, fruit Syzygium oleana (red shoots) and Rosella flowers which have been extracted using the chemicals ethanol (Merck), hydrochloric acid (Merck) and aquabidest.
In his dissertation entitled “Paper-Based Freshness Labels and Tapioca from Extract Syzygium oleana, Ruellia simplex and Rosela for Smart Food Packaging Applications”, he explained the research process he conducted.
“This research focuses on the fruit Syzygium oleana and flowers Ruellia simplex which are widely found around the University of Indonesia and have not been utilized as natural 3-color substances for colorimetric labels. In addition, Rosela flowers are also used, whose petals are known to contain high concentrations of anthocyanins," said Arie.
In this study, Arie created two types of labels with different basic materials, namely paper and plastic. Each label made of these materials was attached to the shrimp packaging as the food ingredient chosen in the trial.
Shrimp, meat, and fish in packaging can be damaged by microbial growth and the formation of biogenic amines. As spoilage increases, the environment inside the package becomes alkaline, therefore, colorimetric labels for detecting meat freshness are usually designed to be sensitive to pH and ammonia, so that the response to food spoilage in packaging can be seen directly with the naked eye in real time.
In detecting the quality of shrimp or fish freshness, color changes occur from red to purple on paper labels and red to gray on plastic labels, indicating that the shrimp or fish have been damaged. If the shrimp or fish are very rotten, the color on the label can change to yellow. Shrimp or fish damage is also validated using laboratory tests.
This research was conducted at the Functional Materials Laboratory of the Department of Physics, FMIPA UI, the Packaging Research Laboratory of the Center for Chemistry and Packaging, and the Integrated Laboratory Research Center (ILRC) DRPM UI.
