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Milan, June 19, 2024 - The tech company xFarm Technologies and Barilla, a global icon of Made in Italy food products around the world, have just announced the complete digitalisation of Barilla's basil supply chain. The project’s main objectives are emissions calculation, full traceability, and improved efficiency along the supply chain. Thanks to blockchain technology, Barilla will also be able to guarantee maximum transparency to end consumers.
The project, which started in 2023 with an initial pilot phase, is now fully operational. The digitalisation involves all 25 companies and cooperatives that supply basil, the main ingredient of Barilla's famous Pesto line, which is marketed throughout Europe. This initiative covers 310 hectares of land.
But the benefits are not only for those who manage the supply chain: an important part of the project has been dedicated to making life easier for the farmers who supply basil. The Barilla Farming platform has been integrated with the DSS developed specifically for Barilla by the Italian National Research Council (CNR) and has also incorporated other systems previously used within the supply chain into a single platform where farmers can enter all their data.
Thanks to the new technological infrastructure developed by xFarm Technologies, the farms supplying basil will be able to track all the primary data relating to the land, from the plots cultivated to the various activities carried out, storing all the data on the Barilla Farming platform, developed by xFarm Technologies in collaboration with the CNR and already in use in the 'Carta del Mulino' soft wheat supply chain.
This makes it possible to effectively calculate the impact of each individual farm, since many environmental parameters, such as carbon footprint, water footprint, acidification and eutrophication, are calculated on the basis of the agronomic activities carried out and visualised directly from the Barilla Farming app.
A broader view of the operations carried out along the supply chain guarantees greater process efficiency, covering the stages from processing to packaging in the factory, thanks to Connecting Food technology, full compliance with the 'Carta del Mulino' by suppliers, and the identification of best practices, ensuring the freshness and authenticity of the final product as well as sustainability.
The ultimate goal of digitalisation is to provide consumers with a sort of "basil identity card" . Thanks to the collaboration with Connecting Food, the journey of the basil—from the field to its processing and packaging—will become fully transparent to consumers, through the scanning of a QR code on the packaging of Barilla Pesto alla Genovese and its garlic-free variant.It will be possible to know where the basil was grown, including through text and photos of the producing farm, collecting data on the stages from field to canning. Blockchain technology will guarantee the authenticity of each piece of information, allowing consumers to be sure of the origin, journey and freshness of Barilla basil.
"Our collaboration with Barilla has a long history, starting in 2020 with the development of the Barilla Farming platform and the digitalisation of the soft wheat supply chain. We are therefore proud to be able to extend the scope of digitalisation also to another important supply chain such as that of pesto, one of the company's flagship products and a symbol of the Italian agri-food industry," said Matteo Vanotti, CEO of xFarm Technologies.
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