Frame shift: From expiry date to "ready-to-use" date on food packets

Made-in-Transit Packaging
Most fresh food comes with a "best before" date, but Amsterdam-based Canadian designer Agata Jaworska thinks it should be marked "ready by." Her concept: packaging in which food can keep growing during shipping to the supermarket so that it arrives ready to be harvested, in a state of optimum freshness.
'Made in Transit' is a supply chain concept in which the production of fresh perishable food happens on the way to the supermarket, shifting the paradigm of packaging from preserving freshness to enabling growth, a shift from 'best before' to 'ready by'.

Transportation is essential in connecting distant factories, and in bringing the goods to the market, but it only serves to relocate the goods, and not to transform them in any productive way. The industry takes for granted that transportation and packaging can only locate and protect and not create or transform.
Transportation and packaging are viewed as essential yet expensive and wasteful.
But if one was to take a total chain perspective from the outset and skip steps, merge steps, or reverse the order of events, maybe transportation can be factored in as a productive creator of value.
Made in Transit is a holistic reconsideration of the product supply chain in which a synthesis of production with distribution creates a new mode of production.
Currently, 'production' equals 'transformation', 'packaging' equals 'protection' and 'distribution' equals 're-location'.
If we can turn the package into a growth condition, then the chain becomes: 1) packaging, 2) on the way growth and 3) consumption.
The packaging and distribution functions would be transformed into production. The consequences of merging production with distribution could lead to the end of the factory since distribution space simultaneously becomes production space thereby eliminating or drastically reducing the need for a land-based production facility. On-demand production could also become more of a reality. If the product can be created on the way to the market, then it does not have to be made until the order comes in. This prevents overproduction and consequent waste.

Read in more detail: http://www.foodproductiondaily.com/Supply-Chain/Made-in-Transit-The-end-of-the-factory
Watch a two minute animation: http://youtube.com/watch?v=oWcOgzNNHlE
A five minute presentation by Agata: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Oras6CRRWzQ