Paper-based dots and smartphone for detecting counterfeit country eggs.

Herein, we present for the first time, the employment of paper-based devices for rapidly differentiating original country eggs from the plain broiler eggs that have been coated with tea to appear as the former. The devices leverage two types of phenomena involving the phenols present in tea in precisely 5 min, namely precipitation, which produces a well-defined dark bluish precipitate on the surface of the counterfeit country eggs or tea-coated broiler eggs and de-coloration, wherein the dried layer of tea coating present on the surface of the dummy country eggs get dissolved, thereby revealing the white colour of the plain broiler egg shell. To reduce the subjectivity, a smartphone application 'Eggo' has been developed which is capable of detecting the spots produced by both the methods using mobile's camera.