Certificates of origin are necessary to maintain transparency in displaying where products such as chips, pasta and schnitzel come from. QR tracking is aimed at helping consumers determine this for themselves in the future. The food products industry and the retail sector face the challenge today of buyers demanding greater transparency. Supermarket customers still want to know things like where the raw materials for a particular product are from, what field the wheat for their toast was harvested in.
“Today‘s consumers are no longer satisfied with a simple list of ingredients. Going forward, they want to know where their Sunday roast and potatoes and red cabbage are really from: from which field, which stall and which slaughterhouse”, explains Holger Behrens, Cormeta AG CEO. Now the idea is for consumers to also have access to information that food producers are already familiar with via batch tracking in SAP ERP applications, i. e. for things like ensuring the ability to supervise recall actions, etc. The food industry and retail sectors can now guarantee that the demand for this transparency is met with the “Certificate of Origin” contained in Cormeta’s Foodsprint SAP Business All-in-One solution. All of the data on the raw materials and their origin can be accessed and traced at any time.
Foodsprint registers origin batches in a variety of ways when goods are received, either using data provided by the producers or optionally via goods received inspections of the supplier batches. The software automatically assigns the origin data to the received goods. This supplier batch then continues throughout the entire production process and is allocated a tracking code which virtually marries it to the production batch from the production order.
When implemented as a QR code printed on packaging for example, the tracking code traces the product back to the original producer. The new function in Foodsprint allows the origin to be clearly traced and tracked. “QR tracking makes it possible to trace all food products found on retail sales shelves. Food product manufacturers using our industry solution provide the highest level of transparency and create trust among retailers and consumers”, emphasises Cormeta CEO Behrens.
