Technically speaking the soldiers are not sniffing the fruit, it’s the sensing technology developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies which is doing the ‘sniffing’. From the April 30, 2012 news item on Nanowerk (I have removed some links),

Every year, U.S. supermarkets lose roughly 10 percent of their fruits and vegetables to spoilage, according to the Department of Agriculture. To help combat those losses, MIT chemistry professor Timothy Swager and his students have built a new sensor that could help grocers and food distributors better monitor their produce.

The new sensors, described in the journal Angewandte Chemie (“Selective Detection of Ethylene Gas Using Carbon Nanotube-based Devices: Utility in Determination of Fruit Ripeness”), can detect tiny amounts of ethylene, a gas that promotes ripening in plants. Swager envisions the inexpensive sensors attached to cardboard boxes of produce and scanned with a handheld device that would reveal the contents’ ripeness.

…

Detecting gases to monitor the food supply is a new area of interest for Swager, whose previous research has focused on sensors to detect explosives or chemical and biological warfare agents.

Here’s how the technology works (from the April 30, 2012 news release by Anne Trafton for MIT News),

Funded by the U.S. Army Office of Research through MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, the MIT team built a sensor consisting of an array of tens of thousands of carbon nanotubes: sheets of carbon atoms rolled into cylinders that act as “superhighways” for electron flow.

To modify the tubes to detect ethylene gas, the researchers added copper atoms, which serve as “speed bumps” to slow the flowing electrons. “Anytime you put something on these nanotubes, you’re making speed bumps, because you’re taking this perfect, pristine system and you’re putting something on it,” Swager says.

Copper atoms slow the electrons a little bit, but when ethylene is present, it binds to the copper atoms and slows the electrons even more. By measuring how much the electrons slow down — a property also known as resistance — the researchers can determine how much ethylene is present.

To make the device even more sensitive, the researchers added tiny beads of polystyrene, which absorbs ethylene and concentrates it near the carbon nanotubes. With their latest version, the researchers can detect concentrations of ethylene as low as 0.5 parts per million. The concentration required for fruit ripening is usually between 0.1 and one part per million.

The researchers tested their sensors on several types of fruit — banana, avocado, apple, pear and orange — and were able to accurately measure their ripeness by detecting how much ethylene the fruits secreted.

It looks like the technology will be commercialized in the not too distant future (from the Trafton news release) here’s why,

John Saffell, the technical director at Alphasense, a company that develops sensors, describes the MIT team’s approach as rigorous and focused. “This sensor, if designed and implemented correctly, could significantly reduce the level of fruit spoilage during shipping,” he says.

“At any given time, there are thousands of cargo containers on the seas, transporting fruit and hoping that they arrive at their destination with the correct degree of ripeness,” adds Saffell, who was not involved in this research. “Expensive analytical systems can monitor ethylene generation, but in the cost-sensitive shipping business, they are not economically viable for most of shipped fruit.”

Swager has filed for a patent on the technology and hopes to start a company to commercialize the sensors. In future work, he plans to add a radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip to the sensor so it can communicate wirelessly with a handheld device that would display ethylene levels. The system would be extremely cheap — about 25 cents for the carbon nanotube sensor plus another 75 cents for the RFID chip, Swager estimates.

“This could be done with absolutely dirt-cheap electronics, with almost no power,” he says.

I should mention that a couple of students were part of the MIT research team with Birgit Esser being the lead author and Jan Schnorr also contributing to the paper in Angewandte Chemie.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued two documents that provide guidance to manufactures of food products and cosmetics according to the April 20, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

Two draft guidance documents that address the use of nanotechnology by the food and cosmetics industries were issued today by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Nanotechnology is an evolving technology that allows scientists to create, explore, and manipulate materials on a scale measured in nanometers – particles so small that they can not be seen with a regular microscope. The technology has a broad range of potential applications, such as the packaging of food or altering the look and feel of cosmetics. [emphasis mine]

They might also have indicated food additives and other ingredients are covered in the guidance. I mention this because I noticed that some of the news coverage does not make that point and people are likely to believe that it covers only food packaging and not ingredients.

You can check out the guidance documents (both the one for foods and the one for cosmetics) for yourself,

Draft Guidance for Industry: Assessing the Effects of Significant Manufacturing Process Changes, Including Emerging Technologies, on the Safety and Regulatory Status of Food Ingredients and Food Contact Substances, Including Food Ingredients that are Color Additives

Draft Guidance for Industry: Safety of Nanomaterials in Cosmetic Products

This US FDA April 20, 2012 press announcement offers some details,

The food draft guidance describes the factors manufacturers should consider when determining whether changes in manufacturing processes, including those involving nanotechnology, create a significant change that may:

affect the identity of the food substance;
affect the safety of the use of the food substance;
affect the regulatory status of the use of the food substance; or
warrant a regulatory submission to FDA.

The cosmetic product draft guidance discusses the FDA’s current thinking on the safety assessment of nanomaterials when used in cosmetic products. Key points include:

The legal requirements for cosmetics manufactured using nanomaterials are the same as those for any other cosmetics. While cosmetics are not subject to premarket approval, companies and individuals who market cosmetics are legally responsible for the safety of their products and they must be properly labeled.
To conduct safety assessments for cosmetic products containing nanomaterials, standard safety tests may need to be modified or new methods developed.

Both guidances encourage manufacturers to consult with the agency before taking their products to market. Such consultation can help FDA experts address questions related to the safety or other attributes of nanotechnology products, or answer questions about their regulatory status.

Strong science is critical to FDA’s ongoing review of the products it regulates.  FDA is investing in an FDA-wide nanotechnology regulatory science program to further enhance FDA’s scientific capabilities, including developing necessary data and tools to identify properties of nanomaterials and assess the impact they may have on products.

“Understanding nanotechnology remains a top FDA priority. FDA is strengthening the scientific tools and methods for evaluating food products, cosmetics, drugs and medical devices,” said FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg, M.D. “We are taking a prudent scientific approach to assess each product on its own merits and to not make broad, general assumptions about the safety of nanotechnology products.”

The FDA’s current thinking concerning nanomaterials for food and cosmetics uses, explained in the two guidance documents, is not intended to provide guidance to manufacturers about the use of nanomaterials in other products, such as drugs or medical devices, regulated by the FDA.

It’s still possible to comment on the guidelines as they are at a ‘draft’ stage, from the FDA’s April 20, 2012 press announcement,

In order to ensure that FDA considers comments on these draft guidances in developing the final guidances, electronic or written comments should be submitted within 90 days of the publication of the notices of availability in the Federal Register. The FDA will carefully consider all relevant, substantive comments during the development of the final guidance documents.

Electronic comments should be submitted to http//www.regulations.gov. Written comments should be submitted to the Division of Dockets Management, (HFA-305), Food and Drug Administration, 5630 Fishers Lane, Room 1061, Rockville, MD 20852.

It looks to me like this is an attempt to develop a relationship where the industry players in the food industry to police their nanotechnology initiatives with the onus being on industry to communicate with the regulators in a continuous process, if not at the research stage certainly at the production stage. That same request is being made to the cosmetics industry, from the draft guidance document for cosmetic products,

If you wish to use a nanomaterial in a cosmetic product, either a new material or an altered version of an already marketed ingredient, FDA encourages you to meet with us to discuss the test methods and data needed to substantiate the product’s safety, including chronic toxicity and other long-term toxicity data as appropriate.  Individuals outside the Federal Government may request a private meeting with a representative of FDA to discuss a matter, and FDA will make reasonable efforts to accommodate such requests (21 CFR 10.65(c)).  We encourage you to take advantage of this provision and contact us to discuss any aspect of the safety assessment of cosmetic ingredients or finished products.

You can read some additional commentary about both draft guidelines in the April 22, 2012 posting on redOrbit, the April 20, 2012 news item by Torie Bosch for Slate magazine, and  the April 20, 2012 Reuters article by Anna Yukhananov in the Chicago Tribune.

One odd thing I noticed in some articles and commentaries (e.g. Reuters article by Anna Yukhananov) is a reference to the European Union rules with regard to cosmetics products. The observers seemed to be under the impression that cosmetics companies with European production facilities and/or headquarters would operate under the same rules in North America. From the Yukhananov article,

The FDA does not require cosmetic companies to submit safety data before selling their products, and the guidance is unlikely to have a big impact on large cosmetic firms like Avon Products Inc, which already comply with European rules.

Why would Avon extend its compliance with European Union (EU) rules to its US operations? Companies routinely operate under different rules in different countries and regions.

Getting back to the question I asked in the headline, do these guidance documents matter? Yes, as stated earlier, I think this is an attempt to develop a relationship with open communication and where industry is being respected enough to manage/police itself. One hopes that this is not misplaced trust.