How Hygienic Is It to Tap Your Groceries?
At the Albert Heijn XL in Rotterdam, customers can, for the first time, ‘tap’ 55 types of dried food from dispensers and take them home in their own containers. You can read here how the Albert Heijn Packaging-Free concept works, but perhaps you’re also wondering: just how hygienic is this?
Because it goes without saying that, with sustainability and the planet we’re leaving to future generations in mind, we’re strongly in favor of using less packaging material. As an individual consumer, you can’t make nearly as much of a difference as the biggest polluting companies could if the government were stricter about it, but hey—we hope every little bit helps. Back to the hygiene issue: what is Albert Heijn doing to ensure that you don’t also tap a scoop of disease-causing bacteria along with your oats?
Chipped and sealed
Quite a lot, as it turns out. Nu.nl published an article in which several people involved in the concept explain the precautions intended to ensure that everything runs smoothly and hygienically. Project leader Hilde van der Vegt and Elisah Pals, founder of Zero Waste Nederland, share their insights. Van der Vegt explains that no one handles the product between the producer and the store. All goods arrive sealed—and therefore protected from air and light—in 12-liter containers. Each container is also fitted with a chip, making the batch fully traceable and even allowing it to be closed remotely so that no one can dispense from it if a problem arises.
Touching or not
Pals says it is a new type of dispensing system that you don’t need to touch with your hands; you only need to hold your container against it. After dispensing a small amount, it stops automatically, and if you want more, you hold the container against it again. We don’t quite understand how this is supposed to work when looking at the accompanying photo above (from Albert Heijn itself), because the customer in question is clearly touching the dispenser with her hand.
Clean containers
That said, we understand that you still don’t touch the product itself this way. Naturally, you are also responsible for bringing a clean, dry container from home (you can also buy reusable containers on-site). And how are the dispensers themselves kept clean? Van der Vegt says there is a cleaning protocol under which the silicone tube is replaced every few weeks (2?4?6?) and the nozzle is regularly cleaned with alcohol. Pals further explains that the dispensers are completely sealed, preventing moisture from reaching the dry products. The risk of mold is therefore small.
More and more packaging-free
Following the example of other food retailers that deliver groceries in jars and various organic supermarkets, Albert Heijn will use this concept and its new technology to expand to at least 50 more stores over the coming year. If you would like to have groceries delivered in jars that you don’t have to clean yourself, you could also check out the online supermarket Pieter Pot. They work with airtight returnable deposit jars that can be used anywhere from forty to one hundred times, and clean them before filling them again.
Also read:
- These groceries are getting more and more expensive; the end of rising prices is still nowhere in sight
- Tested: this is the tastiest (and nastiest!) brie from the supermarket
- The yellow dishcloth is the grossest kitchen item I know
Source: Nu.nl. Image: Yasmin Hargreaves/Albert Heijn
