Grant: Engage Grants Program

One of the main difficulties faced by food and pizza delivery companies is to maintain the temperature of hot cooked foodstuffs, particularly pizzas, during delivery stage from the kitchen to the customer. Especially, in cold climatic conditions, the temperature difference between the ambient and hot food may become substantial. This results in significant cooling and condensation of the food which affects their quality and taste. Although it seems to be easy to keep the food warm enough, there are challenges related to the foodstuff, such as temperature and moisture content/condensation level, in keeping their quality, taste and freshness at the desired level which can be seen as internal qualities. There are also external qualities (or parameters/targets) to achieve such as better efficiency, better cost effectiveness, better health, better resources use and better environment. Furthermore, it is equally important to make these bags healthier with non-toxic, non-flammable, non-corrosive, non-sticky, non-diffusive, etc. materials and their configurations. In this regard, there is a strong need to perform comprehensive research to optimize the storage conditions for the bags to be efficiently and effectively used during the delivery stage. Thus, this project aims to develop novel pizza delivery bags with various options and configurations to achieve the optimum (desired) conditions for pizzas.