Natural Rights Management Refrigerator

A device for selectively storing food and allowing the storage of only legally purchased food items.

1. The Natural Rights Management (NRM) Refrigerator solves the long-standing food industry problem of controlling the illegal acquisition of food products. The NRMR ensures that only legally obtained food products can be stored in an individual's food storage unit (FSU) and will not tolerate the insertion of illegaly obtained food products.
2. The NRMR consists of:
   1. A freon compression system for the chilling of the interior
   2. Weight-measurement scales on all shelves and drawers
   3. A telecommunications connection (e.g. phone or internet)
   4. An external scanning device capable of reading a typical supermarket receipt
   5. An internal barcode scanner
   6. Solid state electronic memory and data-handling processor
3. The NRMR controls the entry of food products by ensuring that each item placed into the device appears on a receipt which has been previously scanned via the receipt scanner and stored item by item in the solid state memory. Once an item has been placed into the NRMR, the item's barcode and/or weight is correlated with the information stored from the scanned receipt. The details of the item are matched with an item from the stored memory. After a match has been made, the item is considered accepted and the information on the item is removed from the memory.




4. When a receipt is scanned, only the relevant information regarding the unique receipt is stored permanently. The items on the receipt are deleted from memory as the actual items are stored in the device. To prevent circumvention by rescanning the same receipt, the unique details of the particular receipt (such as store name, location, date of purchase, and a unique hash of the receipt data) is stored permanently. When a new receipt is scanned, its information is not accepted until it has been determined that there is not a match for the receipt in the stored list of receipts that have already been scanned. No new items on a receipt that is not accepted in this way will be accepted for storage.
5. When an item that does not have a match in the stored item memory is attempted to be placed in the NRMR, the device alerts the user that the item is not acceptable for storage. If the user continues to store the item in the NRMR, the available details of the item are scanned, saved, and reported to a reporting agency via the telecommunications connection.
6. The technology of the NRMR has the added benefit of potentially alerting the user to purchased items on scanned receipts that have not been placed in the device. This would allow the user to easily view any items that he/she has forgotten to place in the refrigerator. The communication link could also be used to alert a maintenance center that the device needs repair.
7. Items purchased from a distributor that does not have modern-type register receipts will not be compatible with the NRMR. Distributors that wish to sell items that can be stored in an NRMR will have to upgrade their POS technology to a compatible system with compatible receipts.
8. Original food items will not be compatible with the NRMR unless they are distributed via a compatible distributor who meets the same POS technology requirements as described above. Producers of original food items will be encouraged to enter into a distribution agreement with a compatible distributor.