Using a smartphone app and a QR code to determine the provenance of that beef in France

Article – French language

Flashez votre barquette de bœuf et retrouvez son origine

My Comments

The recent meat-substitution scandal in Europe where a significant quantity of processed beef and beef-based “heat-and-eat” products sold in that area were filled out with horsemeat has put the meat industry, especially the beef industry, on edge.

But how is the meat industry going to restore consumer confidence in the beef that they are going to purchase especially from the supermarket?

A group of organisations in France have put their heads together to provide a way of checking the provenance of that tray of beef. This involved a group of beef farmers in the Pyrenees, the Vignasse et Donney software developers and the Auchan supermarket chain. With this project, there would be a database that has information on the provenance of the retail packages of meat available for sale. As well, each tray of that meat has a QR code that represents the link to the database about the meat. This would be read by a platform smartphone that runs the “Boeuf Blond D’’Aquitaine” app that shows up information about the meat package whose QR code is scanned.

It could work in restoring the necessary consumer confidence in the meat but this concerns more the sausages, the “cut-up” beef like minced (ground) beef or stir-fry strips as well as the ready-meal products like bolognese, lasagne and moussaka. Here, a lot of this class of food is prepared by third parties and it could be feasible to “balloon” the beef product with pork, oodles of fat or offal or, at worst, horse. This is more so with cheaper versions of these products; and this scandal was primarily anchored around the mislabelling of the product at various points of the preparation process.

I would see the QR-code labelling program and the provenance database being more effective with the sausages and “cut-up” beef which was prepared through the known chain of production established by the partners such as “on-demand on-site” preparation of these cuts by Auchan for example. Similarly, the DNA could be worked out for the meat and meat products and represented in to a smartphone-readable label that can be used by customers to determine the origin of the meat they are to purchase.

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