ALLIANCE Deliverable: Food Fraud Landscape, Strategic Gap Analysis, User Needs & Requirements
The ALLIANCE project and its Deliverable
The first technical deliverable of the Horizon Europe project ALLIANCE (A hoListic framework in the quality Labelled food supply chain systems' management towards enhanced data Integrity and verAcity, interoperability, traNsparenCy, and traceability) has been submitted recently. This project aims to improve transparency and traceability in Food Supply Chains by applying new technologies and unifying laws and requirements all over Europe. So, the objective of the deliverable is to highlight all the ways ALLIANCE can help to improve the state-of-the-art in Food Traceability and Food Safety and Authenticity and how it is applied to the real world, along with understanding what stakeholders demand in terms of functional or non-functional requirements in the system design.
To do so, the document is divided into six sections: first, the project is introduced; then, the literature review on the Food Fraud Landscape in Modern Food Supply Chains explains the situation in which it will be applied; moreover, sections 3 and 4 describe the state-of-the-art for each technology used by ALLIANCE, and they show how the project will help innovate them; last, before the conclusion (section 6), in section 5 the document presents users’ requirements for each pilot use case.
Innovation through ALLIANCE
As written above, the first part of the document analyses the literature to understand what Food Fraud is and how widespread it is. Food Fraud lack of a widely accepted definition, but the most common is “an intentional act of misrepresentation of food for economic gain, which is intended to remain undetected by the consumer and often includes food modification or false documentation”. Furthermore, the results show that, in the last 20 years, the phenomenon increased – with numerous incidents in the industry – and, due to globalisation and the significant number of stages in food processing, it has been difficult to keep up with the threat and monitor all the point of the supply chain, assuring safe products to consumers. In addition, within Food Fraud we can identify seven categories: Substitution, Dilution, Counterfeiting, Mislabelling, Concealment, Gray Market, and Unapproved Enhancements. On the other hand, prevention combines three sciences: food safety, which targets unintentional adulteration; food defence, focusing on intentional adulteration (behavioural-oriented); and food fraud, tackling intentional adulteration (economical-oriented). Thus, ALLIANCE offers eight different technical solutions, that fall into two categories: Food Traceability and Food Safety and Authenticity.
These offerings are all based on modern technologies, aiming to improve state-of-the-art traceability. For example, they use Distributed Ledger Technologies, like Blockchains, to make Food Supply Chains more resilient. In fact, decentralised databases improve the resiliency in the case of food fraud incidences, but they can also help monitoring before these events occur with the use of smart contracts, that minimise the risk of human intervention. Another solution provided by ALLIANCE is the Vulnerability Risk Assessment for Critical Control Points Identification, so monitoring the stages of the process where it is easier to adulterate food. In order to do this, the project’s organisations combine Blockchain and the Internet of Things (IoT): the latter uses connected devices and sensors to monitor and track real-time all the aspects of the food supply chain, and the former provides results verification with its consensus mechanism. Then, the project aims to create an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled Early Warning and Decision Support System. Usually, suspicious activities follow patterns and AI can detect them and alert stakeholders to investigate. Therefore, IoT, AI, Big Data Analytics and Machine Learning (ML) will be used all together to monitor food supply chains and find and check their blind holes. As the objective is to monitor the whole chain, the different networks involved need to communicate, and ALLIANCE makes it possible through their Interoperability Mechanisms in Complex Food Systems. They want to establish standardise protocols tofacilitate the seamless and reliable collaboration and sharing of information.
However, as stated before, ALLIANCE aims to improve safety and authenticity as well, innovating related technologies. First, the project’s members want to increase the use of Next Generation portable DNA Sequencing for Food Analysis. Implementing these tools, and combining them with Blockchains and ML/AI, will ensure authenticity through DNA-authentication tests which results will be recorded in the blockchain and monitored by ML/AI algorithms. In this way, food products’ value will increase, and consumers will be more confident and trustful. Likewise, Food Fraud Detection with Advanced Spectroscopy will use FT-NIR (Fourier Transform Near Infrared Spectroscopy technology) and MIR (mid-infrared spectroscopy) to check the main components of a certain food. To cope better with food fraud and adulteration, another ALLIANCE solution is to create a unique database (digital knowledge base) for preventing food fraud in quality-labelled food, which is currently missing. Consequently, the accessibility to this kind of knowledge will support searchability means. Last, as AI, ML can be trained on large datasets to identify patterns that are indicative of Food Fraud, and, again in the same way as AI, combined with other technologies like Blockchains and IoT, ML can prove itself even more efficient.
Users’ Needs and Requirements
The last, and most important, part describes seven different pilot use cases, where the stakeholders’ opinions were investigated using the Delphi Technique – a method used in human science research. Hence, the technologies described above were evaluated with members of each case to understand better which solution was more relevant and efficient.
To conclude, Food Fraud is becoming a serious issue that is occurring more and more commonly, but there are solutions to cope with this problem and the ALLIANCE project wants to implement them in the EU. Thus to better understand their objectives and methods reading the recent deliverable is the better way.