Blockchain and artificial intelligence keep food and goods safe in the supply chain.

Quick hits:

• FDA New era with smarter food safety plan addresses new food delivery business models.
• Blockchain key to stricter record-keeping requirements.
• Alitheon’s optical artificial intelligence system can authenticate products by simply taking a photo.

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Read the transcript below:

Welcome to Take Five. My name is Stephanie Neil and today we are looking at technologies that will help with traceability and product authenticity.

While the industry has been overwhelmed by supply chain issues and skyrocketing prices, we tend to forget that there are still important regulatory mandates that many manufacturers in the food, beverage and pharmaceutical industries must comply with.

For example, last October the Food and Drug Administration held a three-day summit to better understand how food is sold through business-to-consumer e-commerce models and the standards of care used by the industry to control the safety risks of food sold online.

This followed the introduction of the FDA New era with smarter food safety plan, which was first introduced in 2020, and identifies future courses of action needed to address new food delivery business models.

The plan is centered around four core elements:

• Technically enabled traceability
• Smarter tools and approaches for prevention and outbreak response
• New business models and modernization of the retail trade
• And food safety culture

Technology-enabled traceability is the first step in FDA’s work, which includes harmonizing the key data elements and critical traceability events to provide end-to-end traceability.

And the technology to do that is blockchain.

A reminder of what blockchain is – it’s the technology that underpins cryptocurrencies and other applications by providing a secure, decentralized approach to distributing digital information in a way that can be shared but not modified. The FDA is encouraging more use of blockchain to pinpoint the exact sources of foods involved in an outbreak.

It sounds like a good plan, but it will be up to manufacturers to figure out how to implement a tracking system that includes last-mile delivery to the consumer, and these companies already have a lot on their plate right now.

Fortunately, there are other technologies that can help. I’ll tell you in particular about one that can even keep counterfeit goods out of the supply chain.

In addition to food safety, combating counterfeit goods is another problem area for manufacturers. The traditional approach to this has been barcodes, tags and special labels. The problem is that these things can be removed, damaged or forged themselves.

But a startup company called Alitheon has come up with a way to solve this problem using optical artificial intelligence. Similar to a fingerprint, which is very unique, the optical AI identifies physically inherent characteristics of goods. Because even though they seem identical, they are not.

The Alitheon algorithm captures a unique “FeaturePrint” that can identify small differences in the surface of an element. This image is stored in a system to create a digital baseline for future reference. So the receiving end user can simply take a photo of the item using their mobile phone and the Alitheon app will immediately know if the product is authentic or has been tampered with during the journey.

There are many possible ways to use this technology. This can, for example, solve recall problems. In the automotive industry, a recall requires that all cars in question be brought back to the shop to be checked. Instead, a simple picture of the part will tell the mechanic when it was manufactured, saving a lot of time and money.

That’s all we have time for today, thanks for joining me on this edition of Take Five, see you next time.