Traceability: new paradigms for food & beverage

What are the advantages of serialization for companies and the food supply chain? A word from Emidio Zorzella, CEO of Antares Vision, a Brescia-based company that is an international leader in visual inspection systems and tracking solutions that puts its consolidated expertise at the service of the food sector.

This is confirmed by Emidio Zorzella, CEO of Antares Vision, a global provider of visual inspection and track & trace systems, who explains how these solutions are able to meet the needs of the food & beverage market.

What role do serialization technologies play in the current scenario of the food & beverage sector?
Even where it is not yet mandatory by law, traceability represents an undoubted added value for companies. In fact it helps guarantee the safety of the product and the transparency of its “path” in the supply chain.
Today this function is realized above all in supplying information on the origin of the goods, which enables knowledge of the complete process, from production to consumption.
But the most ambitious challenge is to create a new paradigm, based on “serialization” technologies, which allow each unit to be individually traced, in order to create a sort of “identity card” for each individual product sold».

Can traceability bring benefits to production companies and the supply chain as a whole?
«Of course, since in response to any critical issues, it allows a faster and more punctual management of product recalls, as well as ensuring the monitoring of the supply chain through real-time geolocation.
Last but not least, serialization technologies open up endless possibilities for dialogue with the consumer, who becomes an active and conscious protagonist of his or her choices, thanks to the possibility of verifying the origin of the product and expressing his opinion».

What does serialization actually mean?
«It means generating and associating a unique (serial) code to a single product or package, already in the production phase. Code generation and serial data management is integrated with management systems and offers the possibility of sharing information with multiple users, at different levels (one of the sharing tools can be, for example, the blockchain, but it is not the only one). It is therefore necessary to implement serialization both at the hardware and at the software level. For this reason, interfacing with a technological partner such as Antares Vision, with solid skills on both sources, able to guarantee an integrated management that acts as a “bridge” between physical and digital infrastructure, represents a safe advantage for users».