Foreign beef sold as British beef in the UK – There is a (British) app for that
Foreign beef sold as British beef in the UK – There is a (British) app for that.
On Friday 10th March 2023, numerous news-sites reported a national food fraud probe by the Food Standards Agency in connection to fraudulent beef products and the immediate removal from retailers’ shelves (see Food Fraud link below).
The Australian Meat industry is way ahead of the UK – they commissioned the UK based Countermark team to demonstrate farm to plate – plate to farm beef traceability last year. The solution is described on the AMPC website (see AMPC Solution link below).
Two Countermark based solutions provided to AMPC give much greater security than currently available elsewhere:
1 – Use of edible ink to digitally sign every beef primal – effectively making them edible Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT’s).
2 – Digitally signed every document and label in the beef supply chain, from the abattoir to the supermarket shelf. The customer can then use the Countermark app to scan the pack label to get recipes, learn more about the farm where the animal was raised and get information about how long the meat took to reach the supermarket. The App could also let the farmer know where their produce was sold.
In both solutions data about the farm, abattoir, beef steaks and the primals, and the documentation is stored in the Microsoft Cloud and secured by the Ethereum blockchain.
The Director of Wessex Technology said “there are alternative traceability models being proposed – but they use QR codes, which are not secure, cannot be directly printed on beef, and QR codes are an established security risk for consumers”
Wessex worked with the Department of Food and Nutritional Sciences University of Reading, Tealwood and ABP Foods to develop a great solution to this type of fraud (see Food Safety link below).
More information:
Food Fraud Article:
AMPC Solution:
The Countermark website food safety link:
https://countermark.com/products#food-safety
