Parmesan makers add microchips to cheese wheels to foil counterfeiters
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
The use of blockchain here is very questionable and makes the rest of the product suspect to me.
"The p-Chip is like a special anchor that uses blockchain technology to create a digital copy of real things" -> lol what? It's just a chip that returns a unique serial number when scanned?
Seems like you could accomplish the same thing with an RFID tag (or possibly even a bar code sticker) along with a centralized database.
Having been in a similar anti-counterfeiting startup, a few years earlier, which got chips into a larger number of high-end products... It might well have been a pilot project, and those don't get renewed for a variety of reasons.
In our case, Covid disrupted our awesome first customer's industry right after our very successful factory launch. Covid had cascading economic effects to vendors and programs, of course, and Covid also prevented much of the field auditing follow-through we'd planned on.
Other ways this could fail, even without a black swan global pandemic:
* It's enterprise/corporate sales, which is very difficult and energy-intensive. Even having a no-brainer value proposition doesn't mean a yes. It might take several months of stakeholder meetings and tentative commitments to realize the yes isn't actually imminent like it had seemed. We had a few successes (including landing two top brands), but closing deals arguably took at least as much energy and clever ideas as all our software+hardware+logistics engineering and service design did.
* There might've been effort needed on the customer end, which didn't pan out. We minimized these dependencies, by, e.g., installing our own bespoke networked stations in their best factory, and adapting to their current factory order process, to be almost "zero impedence" (e.g., minimize new IT effort, minimize new corporate effort, minimize ways that dependencies can make mistakes). What a customer is willing and able to do varies from customer to customer (due to, e.g., what their processes and systems are, the nature of the product and how it's made and distributed and sold, various stakeholder motivations, etc.) so you have to tailor it. We thought hard and did a great "prescient" first pass at this for our pilot customer, preventing all sorts of things that could've/would've gone wrong, and still had to respond nimbly to many things we learned in the process.
* You want to show business value from the pilot project, which means stopping some counterfeiting sales effort, or unmasking some gray market diversion. And probably being able to attach a dollar value to that, and/or least show defending goodwill/reputation of the brand (e.g., reduce negative reviews due to people receiving lower-quality counterfeits). This probably means field investigation, since you probably can't arrange for the end customer or intermediaries to do it (merely having the chip and some tracking data alone probably won't do it), which is tricky... but is when you actually get the payoff for all that effort.
That seems easy enough to arrange to have happen, so why didn't it?
But my point is more that the "news hook" on this story is so weak. Announcing the pilot launch of an interesting new product is news. Announcing a pilot launch that already concluded (?) months ago, less so. How did it go? What does the cheesemaker think? Honestly if I were covering this story I'd want to confirm that the product even really exists.
Looks like the p-Chip company did an impressive "road show" of major news outlets in August.
I'd guess for promoting to customers or investors (and they'd have to coordinate with the customer brand, and maybe also they were being discreet about the measures to make the first catches easier).
So I'd guess that the outlets are writing because the company is putting itself out there, and the story does interest. (Ordinary people are noticing counterfeits on Amazon and such, and I'd guess the idea of marrying high-tech with something as old-world charm as Italian cheese wheels has some clicky light news appeal.)
Since we're on HN, from a startup's perspective... we should hope that someday we could swing favorable coverage from top news outlets, and limit hardball interrogations to private dialogue with investors and prospects. :)
What happens to the chip when we do that? Will it stay embedded in the rind after simmering for an hour or two? If not, will it pass through safely if I eat it?
> The p-Chip micro-transponder is a grain of salt-sized silicon chip containing a unique identification code that is attached to the silicon substrate.
It will probably be safe if it gets accidentally ingested.
2) That doesn't say if the chip gets dislodged, whether or not it's big enough to notice before someone swallows it. A grain of salt probably isn't. Hopefully the materials are safe to ingest.
Horrendously irresponsible practice by the manufacturer, IMO.
"Cheese buyers aren't going to eat this embedded label." Are you sure?
I'm personally all for it, fuck the waste they sell in the US such as wood pulp with cheese flavoring sold as Parmesan.
The Parmesan they make in Wisconsin is closer to the cheese they made in Parma a hundred years ago than today’s Parmiggiano Reggiano [1].
Italy went through in a decade, after WWII, the wealth expansion Britain did over a century in its Industrial Revolution. A lot of “classic” Italian culture is carryover from America, e.g. carbonara, or modern mythology.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/6ac009d5-dbfd-4a86-839e-28bb44b2b...
The quality Wisconsin Parmesan's are usually very very good, served in wheels or chunks like quality Reggiano (though as you mention a slightly different cheese to Parmiggiano Reggiano) and I don't know of anyone, Italian or otherwise that would describe them as 'wood pulp with cheese flavoring'.
This "cartel" does not care about others making same cheese even using the same recipe, they just care about protecting the name. For example Kraft sells their own version of parmesan in EU without any problems, they just call it "Pamesello"
In other words, it's not a patent, it's a trademark. Those are much more acceptable IMHO, and are often good.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/larryolmsted/2012/11/19/the-dar...
If we had DOPs from the outset, we'd have a huge number of extra names for the non-regional versions of foods.
Additionally, Italian regulatory bodies are well known for not giving a shit about the products that are exported from Italy, so getting the certified "real thing" isn't a good indicator that, for example, your olive oil is even real olive oil.
https://european-accreditation.org
Olive oil is just vegetable oil made out of olives, but if "Lakonia olive oil" is registered as a PDO then it could only be made in the Greek region of Lakonia using local olives. Olive oil adulterated with other vegetable oils shouldn't be called "olive oil" in the first place. Some "Italian" olive oils are actually from Spain or a mix due to more competitive prices from Spain and EU subsidies. Btw, 2023 is a disastrous year for olive oil producers in Spain because of the spring heatwave which affected the flowering. It's so bad that there was a heist last week involving two tank trailers containing 500 hl worth of Spanish olive oil ready for bottling, totaling €0.5M.
What is wrong with relying on the trademark for such a body's seal of approval, rather than constructing what is essentially a trademark on the name of a product, which is already firmly part of the commons?
Why do you need to prohibit others from using the name Parmesan, when consumers can look for the seal (if the body is trustworthy)?
> Olive oil is just...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ceciliarodriguez/2016/02/10/the...
Salient bit:
> Even the labels bearing the coveted "Protected Designation of Origin" or PDO stamp indicating the precise geographical origin of a particular extra virgin olive oil to ensure the quality of that region’s agricultural products, and which are subjected to more strict controls, have not escaped the illegal trend.
If the government-sanctioned group that gets to essentially trademark terms hundreds of years old (and take them out of the commons) can't do a good job ensuring that the product isn't adulterated, maybe it would be better if these were industry-established groups that could compete with each other to establish a reputation of reliability.
People are prohibited from using the name "Parmigiano Reggiano," which for centuries was not a general term, but the name of the specific regional cheese.
What tends to happen is that a name that gets famous for some high-quality regional food is then used by someone else making a lower-quality food that's cheaper to produce, which does mislead consumers. This is exactly the sort of thing trademarks are for.
A great book on all this is Real Food, Fake Food.
> Within the European Union, the term "Parmesan" may be used, by law, to refer only to Parmigiano Reggiano itself, which must be made in a restricted geographic area, using stringently defined methods.
See also champagne vs. méthode champenoise vs. méthode vs. méthode traditionnelle. In the EU you can't even use the second option anymore. In California, it was initially referred to by the first option, then the second, and now a mix of the second and the third.
I don't think this is helping consumers at all. If they want champagne from the Champagne region of France, they can tell immediately from the label.
Is every buyer supposed to scan the chip and verify? Does that scale?
I think this is for further up the supply chain. Some importer claims to have a great deal on a specific cheese, is it the real deal?
Personally, I'm fine with eating a Parmesan that says it's a slightly different Parmesan.
In this case cheese: you will never buy again if you find it tastes horribly different from what you expected.
Plus it's not like average consumers will have the hardware to verify this new custom chip. Even if it's "un-clonable" as they claim, which I doubt. So if they have to just go to the store and hope anyway, nothing's really changing.
But I do agree that maybe average customer don't care about that.
Indeed, even the headline of this article about P-R just calls it "parmesan", which is the same non-DOP term used to refer to similar-style cheese produced in many other places (eg Hungary) and sold in the USA.
One could say, why can't the US produce sparkling wine or sweet red wine without calling it Champagne or Port wine? I don't agree with the concept of cultural appropriation for anything, but having huge American conglomerates pump money into a mass produced product and slapping it with the name of a tiny region of a small country to eliminate all the local small producers is the single exception where I think it applies.
Plus it doesn't even lock anyone out, you can (and people do), buy land in the region and produce locally if you really want to. What you can't do is sell California wine and market it as something it's not to protect small producers.
Anybody could do that. Rather problem is it won't be successful since people recognize "champagne" and they will order that. Even if they know that sparkling wine could be the same type of beverage they will immediately assume it is inferior regardless of the actual quality.
It's a nigh-insurmountable obstacle to overcome centuries of advertising, legal entrenchment, and habit for any new start up company that just wants to make a high quality good.
The status quo only helps the large corporations that have been advertising and lobbying for the last century.
It could be successful if these people stop being snobs and educate themselves a bit. For instance I like Prosecco, not Champagne sparkling wine. But since the former is not a protected designation of origin, I have to revert to buying DOC or DOCG, look for Conegliano, Valdobbiadene or Milesimatto on the label. If a large wine producer from say Germany would start slapping these words on Sekt labels and flood the EU market with the product, how would I be able to tell the difference without buying and tasting the product? Luckily, the Germans like it extra dry and are proud of their own product, which is great.
Weather/temperature/pressure patterns aren't trivial things to control, neither are soil conditions, or atmospheric composition (particulates, organisms, pollutants, etc).
So to say that XYZ cheese or wine or whiskey isn't unique because of where it comes from is a falsehood, that is something that should remain in use unless you can prove that it doesn't matter (which so far all meaningful attempts have failed).
What the issue is, really, is that naming rights/conditions/etc are by and large too restrictive in the EU. The US is much better in that respect, though still far from perfect, but what winds up happening, like you've said, is that large corporations leverage government in order to create regulations that benefit them in some way. That's a huge problem to solve, and exists in every industry that matters and many that don't.