Case Study

The traceability of agri-food products with a view to safeguarding and sustaining Italian trade is a matter of the moment amongst sector operators because of the considerable advantages it could offer in terms of running checks and building up the brand name. Traceability does not only satisfy increasingly stringent statutory requirements, it also meets consumers’ growing need for information and a relationship of trust. It has become essential for the general public and enterprise alike.

A few figures? According to the 2017 report of the Central Inspectorate for Quality Protection and Fraud repression (Icqrf) whose job it is to combat food-related fraud, out of over 50,000 checks:

And the wine-making sector was the launch pad for the traceability platform created by Almaviva as the technological partner of SIAN (the National agricultural information system). The traceability of wine provides consumers with a guarantee of quality and safety as well as underpinning the efforts of supervisory bodies to prevent fraudulent operations.

A focus on figures to safeguard the market

Almaviva’s Italian-wine traceability project aims to protect and boost the reputation of national wine-based products by using the information stored in SIAN (the national agricultural information system).

The system is reliant on a public blockchain platform designed for wine-production-chain certification (from grape harvesting to the bottling stage) which is coordinated and supervised by AGEA (the agency responsible for allocating agricultural grants) and can be freely used by any player in the supply chain (SMEs, the large-scale retail trade, private stakeholders, etc.), regardless of who they are, to create added-value services that bring together key parties with similar interests, by using their own IT supplier to interact with and benefit from the platform.

Unlike other products on the market, this solution taps pre-existing information on the servers of the Ministry of Agricultural, Food, Forestry and Tourism Policies and AGEA (the agency responsible for allocating agricultural grants) that has been collected for reasons of compliance with statutory requirements and certified by preliminary checks prescribed by European legislation. The data comes from the dematerialised registers of the wine producers, the annual viticultural declarations and the Wine Estate List.

The platform allows the firms not only to leverage the historical background of their wine but also to share insights into its enological virtues and interesting facts for tourists: photos, video footage, product description and anything else that serves to promote their business activities and the local area.

The story behind the bottle. Easy with the eNology App

Growing, processing, distributing and consumption. Developed for Android and iOS, the “eNology” App for mobiles allows users to easily access and exploit data from the suppliers’ blockchain platform. Once the App has been installed on a smartphone with an NFC reader, it will be sufficient for the smartphone to come hover over the bottle label.

4.0 supply chain for Agrifood. And not only

By the end of 2018, 12 enological firms had adopted Almaviva's solution and it is expected that traceability will soon be activated on 60,000 bottles due to line the shelves of supermarkets and hypermarkets. The project has already been extended to include olive oil and wine vinegar.

The public blockchain solution used for the wine-making sector has a series of technological features which makes it extremely easy to adapt to other agri-food sectors because impact would be minimal in architectural and process-flow terms.

What is more, the same identical method can be applied to other industrial markets in order to trace, for instance, the origins of raw materials, certification, testing and maintenance processes for industrial equipment and systems, not to mention the lifespan of spare parts. Using a similar system, engineering firms could achieve higher efficiency levels and perform more stringent checks, on the one hand, and become in turn manufacturers of instrumentation in support of the new 4.0 supply chain, on the other. These firms could create machinery that makes it easy to read and write smart tags that are able to communicate with the new decentralised Web 3.0 paradigms or the blockchain-ready apparatus. All these activities fall into the National 4.0 Industry Plan.

Safety is ensured with blockchain

Blockchain is categorised under the family of distributed ledgers, systems which allow the nodes of a network to make consensual changes to a database, eliminating the need for a central authority.

The use of Ethereum technology, one of the most advanced forms of blockchain to date, ensures that the data is in the public domain and disseminated and that it cannot be changed by anyone. This provides consumers with a guarantee of transparency, quality and safety, as they can be absolutely sure where the product comes from.

2017 was a year of unprecedented new beginnings. Blockchain launched a series of projects with a growth rate of 73%. According to 2018 research figures gathered by the blockchain-&-distributed-ledger Observatory of the Polytechnic University of Milan, most of these projects (59% of those included in the survey so far) were developed in the finance sector, but from 2017 onwards there has been a gradual extension into the following fields of application

The method involves each bottle having a unique NFC tag which safely interfaces with the wine's history - from grape growing, harvesting and transportation to the various production phases, including storage in vats, bottling and distribution.

Furthermore, the usage of NFC and RFID technology helps people to become informed aware consumers. Smart labels mean that everyone can find out about what is behind a bottle of wine and discover those special features that make it quite unique in the world.