Savvy shoppers increasingly expect to know the origin of the food they eat, whether they shop at farmers’ markets or big-box major retailers. A prototype app aims to provide full transparency from farm to table along food supply chains and meet the needs of smallholder farmers, boutique producers, and industrial growers.

Official food certification systems exist in many countries, but experts say the financial cost of implementation and the labor costs of maintenance are impractical for small-scale producers. Existing certifications systems can also be exploited by unscrupulous sellers who fake certificates or logos of authenticity for premium products, like Japanese wagyu beef and Italian Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, or for environmentally ethical products, like dolphin-safe tuna.

«Our motivation was to design a food tracking system that is cheap for smallholder farmers, convenient for consumers, and can prevent food fraud,» said Kaiyuan Lin, a third-year doctoral student at the University of Tokyo and first author of the research study published in Nature Food.

The research team’s food tracking system begins with the harvest of any ingredient, for example, rice on a family farm. The farmer opens the app on a mobile phone, enters details about the amount and type of rice, then creates and prints a QR code to attach to the bags of rice. A truck driver then scans the QR code and enters details into the app about where, when, and how the rice was transported to the market. A market vendor buys the rice, scans the QR code to register that the rice is now in their possession, and enters details about where and how the rice is stored before resale. Eventually, the vendor might sell some rice directly to consumers or other manufacturers who can scan the QR code and know where the rice originated.

«My mission is to make sure the system is not lying to you. Data are recorded in our digital system only when transactions happen person-to-person in the real, physical world, so there can be no fraud,» said Lin.

If an imposter registered counterfeit QR codes to dupe consumers, farmers would notice that their alleged harvest size suddenly duplicated itself in the app. Farmers can also choose to receive updates from the app about where, when, and in what form their harvest eventually reaches consumers.

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Materials provided by University of Tokyo. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.