As a quality food supplier, your business depends on your customer’s confidence in the care and quality of your product. Until now customers have only your word to go on and anyone else could tell the same story whether or not they produce the same quality standards that you do. The Farm 2 Fork (F2F) food information system allows a company to prove the quality of its product directly to the customers, who can then access the
traceability information using their mobile devices. For the very first time you can share your confidence in the excellence of your product and ensure premium prices against lower quality products through a Europe wide standard information system.
F2F highlights the principles of interoperability and visibility in the food supply chainprocesses, supports food traceability practices (cold chain and environment monitoring, provenance, production control), gives reliability to companies and increases transparency towards the end consumer (clear nutrition values, graphics and maps about a single product).
F2F is conceptualized to deliver traceability objectives, avoidance of counterfeiting and quality assurance through one single system:
• Production events are captured using a range of technologies RFID, sensor
networks, barcodes and production records.
• The event records are stored in a secure international database.
• Database of captured events generates the history of individual items.
• Products are serialised using barcodes or QR codes.
• Web service infrastructure allows the customer to query the database to retrieve a customised web page for each item, containing product traceability and condition information as well as your own selected promotional material.
Food suppliers need to understand the way traceability contributes to the marketing strength of their product; this should lead to the decision of adopting a business specific system to provide the needed information to the F2F common open infrastructure. It is possible to build your own business productivity applications using the F2F database and web services, and you can decide what data is released to partners in the supply chain, or to the general public, or what is kept private about traceability. Your competitive advantage is with the story you want to tell, that comes from the definition of the system which captures your production data and presentation of that data to the customer.