Waterloo, Ontario chemical imaging company P&P Optica will be led by CEO Olga Pawluczyk at the Google Demo Day – Women’s Edition on November 2 in Palo Alto, California, as the company showcases its Smart Imaging technology, aimed at revolutionizing the food processing industry.
PPO was chosen, along with the other companies presenting at the event, from more than 800 applicants in over 65 countries.
“Our technology can literally improve the quality of the food we eat and make it safer, so getting to present it on Google Demo Day – Women’s Edition is a real coup,” Pawluczyk said. “We use the science of spectroscopy to identify in real time, things like plastic or other contaminants that all too often make their way into food as it is being processed.”
Contaminants in food processing result in extra costs and bad PR for food producers, who typically have to implement a recall when food gets contaminated, not to mention the danger posed to public health if the contaminant makes it all the way to store shelves and dinner tables.
The company’s systems can also eliminate unnecessary food waste by rejecting food on the basis of its chemical composition rather than by traditional visual methods, which often results in perfectly good food being thrown away.
Pawluczyk is a graduate of the Systems Design Engineering program at the University of Waterloo.
P&P Optica was originally founded as an optics consulting company back in 1995 by Pawluczyk, along with her father and brother who worked at the National Optics Institute in Quebec City, with Pawluczyk eventually becoming the company’s CEO in 2004, bringing it to the iteration that it’s recognized for now.
Investors at the Google Demo Day event in Palo Alto will know that PPO’s technology is highly relevant to the US$4 trillion global food processing market.
Although P&P Optica’s spectral imaging systems technology has as its most direct application food data analytics, it also has applications in the recycling, oil and gas, and biomedical industries.
Pawluczyk will be making the case at the Google Demo Day – Women’s Edition that the potential for P&P Optica’s patented technology is huge, combining innovation in chemical-imaging-hardware design with a ground-breaking approach to food data analytics, giving food processing companies the ability to collect an unprecedented amount of big data about food, inline, to instantly reach conclusions about the chemical makeup and active chemical processes of food products.
In July, a spectrometer built by P&P Optica was launched from Cape Canaveral aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, along with approximately 280 other research tools for conducting experiments in space, to be used by researchers aboard the ISS to conduct a number of experiments, mainly to obtain information about the composition of the atmosphere by measuring light from the Sun at hundreds of wavelengths.
PPO’s patented holographic Gel Gratings are part of the company’s Smart Imaging systems, capable of solving challenges in food processing in unprecedented ways.
You can watch the Google Demo Day – Women’s Edition live on YouTube, and viewers can vote for presenting companies via slido.com.
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