Monday, February 14, 2011

Idea for startup

My wife and I were invited to a bat mitzva party the other night; in retrospect, this was more like a wedding party than a bat mitzva in terms of how people were seated and served food. As one of the parents is Moroccan - and so there were many Moroccan guests - it is not surprising that most of the food served was spicy, or as we say in Hebrew, charif. My stomach (and my lips) are very sensitive to spicy food which is why almost all of the food which I eat is bland.

As I was contemplating a bowl of tomato based spread in front of me, an idea for a startup popped into my head: develop testing strips (like those which test the amount of glucose in urine) which can tell how hot/spicy (piquance) a given food is. This would be very useful for people like me, although it would probably mean that there was nothing at this party which I could eat. The redder the colour of the strip, the hotter the food! Apparently, there is something called the Scoville scale which measures the piquance of a chili pepper.

This idea is probably technically feasible: presumably one has to find an indicator for capsaicin, or for capsaicinoids in general, although these may not be the only active ingredients which are causing the piquance. The wiki link to the Scoville scale says that high performance liquid chromatography is necessary to measure the capsaicinoid content; this would have to be miniaturised into a form suitable for a paper strip.

I mentioned this idea to the man sitting to my left but he wasn't too enthusiastic about it (although he did say that such a litmus paper would probably dissolve when dipped into that tomato paste). Anyway, I offer this idea to the public domain. Please get in touch with me if you have developed such an instant test - but don't expect me to invest in the company.

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