The idea of tracking the food supply chain is very much in the wheelhouse of the IoT, which is why the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) is likely to have a huge impact on the industry. Taking this upcoming trend right on, Barilla pasta and Cisco are working together to implement IoT technology to help the brand track its pastas, box-by-box and customer-by-customer.
Each box of Barilla brand farfalle pastas and jar of a tester variety of sauce is to be printed with an unique QR code so that the brand can find out what its consumers are buying, where they’re buying it, and most importantly, why. The why gets answered when the customers scan the code with the Barilla app. It will give them health and nutrition information, and will track what items they are checking out.
“We’ve seen the importance of knowledge about food. Provenance is becoming a major differentiator of the food industry,” said Shaun Kirby, CTO, Cisco Consulting Services. “Now consumers get a wealth of knowledge that lights up that box of pasta and differentiates it.”
Using their smartphones, consumers scan the QR code on the back of the pasta boxes and sauces and that allows them to literally begin at where and how the grains and tomatoes were grown, over to following the dough to where it was made into farfalle, for example. The integrated tracking system from Cisco will give consumers greater transparency and traceability of their food.
Barilla will get real-time data and analytics to better monitor food quality, prevent costly recalls due to spoilage, streamline food production, and even provide consumers complete transparency and traceability of their food, while customers get the foodie insights that they crave.
The system runs on a platform called Safety for Food, which is powered by ValueGo software. ValueGo, developed by Penelope S.p.A, is the core system of the Safety for Food project, with specific agri-food vertical features for compliance checking, tracking and tracing of all food information along the entire supply chain and for building a ‘digital passport’ for food products.
“Through this innovative initiative, we aim to not only provide greater transparency and safety in the supply chain, but to also give consumers a greater connection to their food,” said Giorgio Beltrami, Global Director, Quality, Food Safety and Regulatory, Barilla. “By following the story of the specific batch of Barilla pasta or sauce they are enjoying, consumers can better correlate the food with the culture of the area in which it was born. As a family-owned company making quality Italian food for almost 140 years, it fills us with great pride to share that culture with our customers.”
“They [Barilla] are looking to go beyond this initial use case,” Kirby said. “It lays the foundation to do so much more. Once the connectivity infrastructure is in place you can deploy many different strategies.”
Edited by
Stefania Viscusi
