Empowering European Customers: A Digital Ecosystem for Farm-to-Fork Traceability

Empowering users through the provision of more and enriched information about the (food) products they buy, so that they are able to make more conscious decisions, is one of the key objectives of the European Commission and the European framework programmes for research and innovation. The Industry 4.0 revolution has made it technologically possible to achieve this objective, but some logistic challenges remain open. Mainly, the great complexity of current supply chains makes it very difficult to “move” information from primary producers to final customers. A global agreement about data formats, information storage, confidentiality, etc. is nowadays unreachable. Thus, innovative tools that do not require such coordination and that allow, although partial, a relevant data sharing policy are needed. Different experiments have been reported, but, in general, they are focused on unelaborated products (such as vegetables or chicken meat). Solutions for more complex products, such as bakery products, which are composed of several different ingredients need to be investigated. This paper addresses this gap. In this paper, we describe a new tool for elaborated products traceability (named TrFood) based on QR codes, web technologies, and composition schemes. This application may also control the ecological footprint and the geographical origin of the supplies and final products. Users may obtain all this information using a specific mobile application. Furthermore, real deployment and experimental validation with real users was carried out in the context of the European DEMETER project. Results show a relevant improvement in the Quality-of-Experience of customers when using the TrFood tool.