In September this year, 22-year-old Solveiga Pakštaité won the national leg of the James Dyson award for a tiny yet remarkable design that was only ever meant to be her final major project at university. The product? Bump Mark: a super-smart, super-simple, gelatine-filled expiry label for food packaging, designed primarily for visually impaired people to feel when their food has gone off, but with the added universal benefit of being significantly more accurate than the dates currently printed on our food packaging.

Small and triangular in design, the bio-reactive Bump Mark is designed to be stuck on to packaging at the time the food is packaged. If the label feels smooth, your food is fresh - but if it feels bumpy, then it’s better off in the bin. Bump Mark is made up of four layers: a bumpy sheet of plastic is covered by a squidgy layer of gelatine and sandwiched between two sealing layers of plastic film. Gelatine, being a natural substance, reacts to factors such as temperature, oxygen and sunlight in the same way as food, and if attached to fresh food as a sealed label, it mimics the food’s process of decay. When the product inside the packaging is fresh, the gelatine in the label stays solid. But as the food starts to go off, the gelatine breaks down and becomes a liquid, making the bumpy layer beneath evident to anyone running their finger along the Bump Mark label.

The label’s genius resides in its accuracy with any type of food. “All you have to do is alter the concentration of the gelatine formula,” Pakštaité explains. “Say you wanted to put Bump Mark on a pack of strawberries, you’d measure how many days they’d last at the optimum temperature and match the gelatine formula so it would also last the same amount. The more gelatine per water in the formula, the more bonds there are, so the longer it will take for the gelatine to break down. For items that don’t last as long, like meat and milk, you’d lessen the amount of gelatine in the formula.”

Pakštaité’s design has come along at the right time. Food waste has become a concern in recent years, and a sizeable portion of the thousands of tonnes of consumable food we throw out in this country has been blamed on the often overly cautious “best before” and “use by” dates on our food packaging. “A lot of the solutions that retailers are being pushed to look at – and they are being pushed to look at solutions that will help people waste less food – are mostly electronic-based,” Pakštaité tells me. “Some cost at best 2p a label, which is very expensive. Bump Mark doesn’t contain any electronics, so it’s going to be far more low-cost.”

Since winning the award, Pakštaité’s inbox has been overflowing with requests from companies large and small desperate to employ her design. She’s used her award money to apply for a patent (still pending), and in November, she ran a big retail trial with Asda. If the results are good, it’s very likely Bump Mark will be in our fridges and cupboards around the country in 2015.

Pakštaité is passionate about her product, and about the need for smarter food labelling. “I’ve come from a family that does not waste food” she tells me emphatically. Born in Norway to Lithuanian parents who moved to England when she was five, Pakštaité, like many other recent graduates, is currently living with her parents, and commutes to her job at a behavioural insight company in Shoreditch. How have her family reacted to her success? “They’re really proud,” she smiles. “I think my grandma’s told all of Lithuania about me.”