Starting Thursday, shoppers at Quality Foods in View Royal can take part in testing a piece of innovative COVID-19 technology.
The Clean Cart is the first of its kind in Canada and uses far-UV light to kill 99.9 per cent of viruses on shopping carts. Now, when customers enter Quality Foods, they can grab a cart, push it into the cleaning cube, wait for the light to turn green and go about their shopping.
“It’s the cleanest you can get a shopping cart,” president of Quality Foods, Noel Hayward, said proudly. While most grocery stores have been diligently sanitizing shopping cart handles between each customer, the Clean Cart cleans every single part of the cart.
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Hayward also emphasized that the far-UV light is completely safe. “It can’t penetrate your skin or your eyes so it’s very safe and very fast,” he said. To be exact, it takes 20 seconds for each cart to be cleaned.
For customers who like to bring reusable bags, they can clean those too by leaving them in their shopping cart while it sits in the Clean Cart. “We’ve also been told that you could – if you were really concerned about germs – come back and run it through again with your groceries after you’re done shopping,” store manager, Roger Prive, said.
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Eventually, they would like to set it up so customers can run their strollers through too, Prive added.
For now, the grocery store is looking for feedback. Prive said they will soon have a survey up on their website and social media where people can let them know what they think.
Creators of the Clean Cart, PCL Construction and Sterilray, have been working on the device for over six months now and will be working to get it into grocery stores across North America.
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