Europe's top food safety experts are joining forces to crack down on fraud. Euronews is following them in this special series called The Food Detectives. In Episode 3, we meet the Finnish team making farm products you can trust.
Which cows produced the milk for my cheese? When and where was the barley in my artisanal beer grown and harvested? Those are the kinds of questions that consumers will be able to answer using a new QR code system for farm products developed by The Food Detectives in Finland.
The key to their innovation is to bring together precise and detailed information about each individual packet of cheese or bottle of beer with a simple QR code on the label. The data already exists, of course, but it's seldom visible to consumers until now.
The aim is that even small-scale artisanal producers can adopt this technology and offer their customers the chance to see exactly where the raw materials came from. It means you can watch a video of the cows, see the farm where they graze, or a map of the fields where the barley in your beer was grown.
The whole production process aims to be utterly transparent, with batches of production carefully tracked all the way along the supply chain, from the farm to the fridge, with each packet given a unique label.
Why is this necessary? Because even locally-made goods that you may buy from a farm shop could be susceptible to fraud, according Hanna-Leena Alokami, who leads the pilot project as part of the EU's Watson project.
"Even in small-scale production, counterfeiting of products can occur, and that's why it's important that we have ways to address the authenticity of the product and trace where the raw material came from," she tells Euronews.
Examples of such activity could include adding milk from undeclared producers, or using barley grown in a different region or country to that stated on the bottle.
Pekka Karhunen, from Upcode, the company behind the printed QR technology, partnered with Bock's Corner Brewery to test the Watson technology. He tells Euronews that imitation is a genuine issue in high-value and low volume products. "For example, our beer has won the ‘Best Beer in Finland’ award. I could imagine that many competitors might, based on that, try to produce, brew, and label products as if they were ours," he explains.
Easy-to-adopt technology
One of the key goals of this team is for small scale producers to be able to easily deploy their total transparency solutions using reliable and well-known technology like QR codes, according to Upcode CEO Sture Udd.
"What we are doing is actually an exciting combination of using standard technologies that are currently available, but bringing together a system where you invest in mastering the information so that it can be utilized by everyone involved with a product — the producer, logistics, the store, the consumer — and it also includes recycling," he says.
Allowing buyers to better engage with smaller brands and help to contribute to the development of their products is also a central objective for the Finnish team. Once a customer has scanned a label, they can write a note to the producer, click on surveys and give suggestions for new products. The vision is to create a virtuous cycle of transparency and trust.
Euronews creates The Food Detectives
The Food Detectives series follows the research within the EU's Watson project, funded by the Horizon Europe programme. Euronews is a member of the Watson project consortium, alongside 46 other EU and non-EU partners from industry and academia. Watson aims to give food safety authorities better tools to detect and prevent food fraud.
Join us for The Food Detectives LIVE EVENT on the Euronews YouTube channel on Thursday 27th November at 17.30 direct from Brussels.
