Fingerprint of agro-food products for quality control

Small enterprises in the agri-food sector need support tools in their everyday work that will help them apply quality standards. However these companies often lack possibilities and means to develop new solutions. As consumers, more and more we want to know everything of the products we buy. Thanks to flexibility and modularity of the system developed, an Italian company working with agro-food micro SMEs, has now made possible to check entry ingredients and production processes (i.e. presence of contaminants or events that may occur during production cycle - change in temperature, weather events that impact on production, or other). In the analysis, comparison is done with national nutritional facts of products: company can now perform such an activity with France and Switzerland (and Italy as well), but is open to eventual interest from other countries. Methodology adopted is Near InfraRed that allows to get a fingerprint of each single product that is compared to "models" and allows to get the information needed. By this way, each company can have own products' fingerprint to scan and monitor own range of products. The Italian company is interested in commercial agreements with technical assistance or technical cooperation agreements with agro-food related operators.