Leveraging product quality inspection to improve supply chain transparency

Inline product quality inspections provide crucial information to ensure the safety and integrity of the product. Digitalization and traceability along the supply chain up to consumer interaction are the added value of our end-to-end solutions. Going from physical to digital enables to optimize production and distribution efficiency along the supply chain, to meet regulatory requirements and the increase consumer demand of transparency, product safety and origin.
Visibility, transparency, traceability, and consumer engagement are the best tools to protect and build trust in a product and a brand and, at the same time, to protect it.
According to the aim to guarantee the quality and safety standards required by the market and consumers, producers must be able to constantly monitor the position of their products along the supply chain, and know their state of conservation at any time, to certificate their origin, quality, and safety. Being able to have all this information in real time is not at all easy. Thanks to the end-to-end solutions of Antares Vision Group today it is possible to perform a complete tracing, from the field to the table, integrating the data collected by in line inspection systems with those managed by a food traceability platform to know the whole product history.

Smart tracking also means being able to manage food safety programs and quality data in all aspects of operations, to identify and correct non-conformities in real time, through machine learning algorithms and statistics on root causes.
Being able to certify the origin of products and ensure the transparency of the supply chain is important for the reputation of each brand.

To better explain how food traceability works, let's consider the example of a rice salad, made up of the following ingredients: rice, olives, carrots, corn, and olive oil.
By establishing an integration between online inspection systems and food traceability platform, it is possible to collect data relating to each phase of the supply chain for all the ingredients of the recipe, starting with their cultivation, through processing, transformation into rice salad, packaging, inspection of the packaged product, up to the stage of transport and selling in the shops, and then conclude its journey by arriving on the tables of consumers.

The consumer, by framing the QR code placed on the label of each container with his smartphone, will be able to access all the information made available by the platform and reconstruct the entire supply chain of the product backwards, ensuring himself of the quality and safety of what he’s going to eat.
An additional level of security is possible through serialization, creating a unique digital identity for each individual product package.
By uniquely identifying each item through a serial code, it will be possible to carry out withdrawal or recall actions aimed at the concerned individual units, thus reducing waste and costs for the manufacturer, and stemming phenomena such as counterfeiting and parallel markets.

Not only that, but digital identity can also become a powerful marketing tool in the hands of producers. Based on the data collected, it is possible to construct and transmit targeted messages, structured on the audience, its geolocation, language, etc.
Finally, the platform can also support brand loyalty activities such as points collections, sweepstakes, and lotteries, for an increasingly targeted and personalized user experience.