This gadget can make food last longer in your fridge - we've tested it

Every year households in the UK generate millions of tonnes of food waste. I'm ashamed to say I'm something of a contributor.

The occasional mouldy courgette, an apple we forgot about, some lettuce that just didn't keep, and a jar of jam we don't remember buying are among the items we've binned over the last month or so.

The wife and I cook fresh food as much as possible, so our fridge is usually brimming with fruit and veg, especially at the beginning of the week.

And the trouble with buying fresh food is you can't always guarantee how long it's been on the shelves. You might be able to grab a box of blueberries that have just arrived that morning, or they might have sat for a day or two.

So I was very keen to try out Shelfy, a smart device that's designed to keep food fresher for longer, potentially even doubling its lifespan.

It sits on a shelf quietly humming away, purifying the air and doing all sorts of other things I'm simply not intelligent enough to understand.

Vitesy, the company that invented Shelfy, explains that it degrades the molecules responsible for ripening fruit and veg, reduces circulating bacteria and kills off microorganisms and mould to avoid any contamination.

I've been using it for several weeks in our main fridge, a big American-style fridge that's getting on a bit and is very much in need of a clean-out.

Shelfy connects to an app, and the app reports back with all sorts of useful snippets of information, such as how often the door is being opened, how healthy the inside of your fridge is, how well it's working, and then it gives you tips. Think of it, in a way, like a Fitbit for your fridge.

Vitesy is really keen on sustainability, so Shelfy is rechargeable through USB and, although it has filters, they don't need to be replaced. You can just wash them.

It also monitors the temperature of your fridge so, if you're making your food too cold, it'll advise you to turn it down a bit.

The big question, then, is does it work? Does it make food last for longer? One of the tests I was keen to perform was seeing how my home-grown logan berries would react. We don't always have time to pick them from the garden straight away and we've usually only got a few days to eat them before they're getting a bit over-ripe.

We put half a batch in our little built-in fridge, without Shelfy, and the other half in the "big fridge", and Shelfy definitely did the trick. They lasted a few days longer.

Vitesy says food can stay fresh up to 12 days longer, and that certainly seems plausible. We've learned it works well when sat in the veg drawer, and we've kept a big bag of courgettes going for nearly two weeks without them starting to soften. And I got a frankly remarkable three weeks out of a bag of spring greens before they became inedible.

These are extreme examples, perhaps, but in practical terms our weekly large punnet of mushrooms now tastes so much better by the end of the week. They were sometimes getting a bit past it by the time we mash them up into a Friday night omelette.

This means it saves us money buying a mid-week top-up, and it brings me on to the economics of it all.

The Shelfy costs £149, and that's a lot of money. I've seen one recently on Amazon for £119.20, so you might catch an offer, but it's still quite an investment.

Although we buy a lot of fresh fruit and veg, we don't necessarily lose enough in monetary terms to make back the investment of buying a Shelfy. But that's not entirely the point.

We're keeping our food better, making it healthier by the time we eat it, and locking in the nutritional value for longer.

We're also taking better care of our big, posh fridge, and apart from recharging it every three weeks or so, Shelfy doesn't have any ongoing costs.

So I think it's a great addition to a family's food storage system. If you care about nutrition, or if you like to make sure your weekly shop isn't wasted, it's something you'll definitely get your money's worth out of.

I'm not saying it's something every home should have, but if they did, we'd certainly throw a lot less food away. And that's always got to be a good thing.