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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 main objectives of the project are the calculation of emissions, full traceability, and 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 activity 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 created specifically for Barilla by the Italian National Research Council (CNR), and has integrated other systems, which were previously used within the supply chain, into a single place 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, archiving all the data on the Barilla Farming platform developed by xFarm Technologies with the CNR and already used in the "Carta del Mulino" (Charter of the 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 the Connecting Food technology, full compliance with the "Carta del Mulino" by suppliers and the identification of the most virtuous practices, in favour of the freshness and genuineness of the finished product and sustainability.
The ultimate goal of the digitalisation is provide consumers with a kind of "basil identity card" . Thanks to the collaboration with Connecting Food , the basil's journey from the field to its processing and packaging in pots will become transparent for the consumer, thanks to the scanning of a QR code on the packaging of the 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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