End to end traceability Systems

Nowadays, the improvement of food quality and safety has become an enthralling challenge for industry and research. Recently, the escalation of food and product contaminations and the recalls originated from both industrialized and emerging countries has eroded trust in Food Consumer Product manufacturers.
New generations of food traceability systems are expected as being able to collect and communicate transparent and trustworthy information, from farm to table, of a given product ensuring its safety and reliability.


Agro-industry requires traceability systems with more breadth, depth and precision than those already used in order to fit strategic and operational needs of their food processing steps, thus assuring and promoting the genuineness and authenticity of their product. In this context, considering the huge available information namely logistic, business and biological along a food production supply chain is fundamental.

Biological traceability can be defined as the detection of a food supply chain starting material in its last consuming step through different methods of which the determination of molecular fingerprints known as biological signature of a given product.

Our study has encountered the bio-molecular traceability of wine supply chain using genotyping and metagenomic approaches.

In this purpose we exploited informative fundamental elements tracing the chain and given by chloroplast, nuclear and mitochondrial markers of Vitis vinifera cultivars, yeast and bacterial strains. A genotyping approach can exactly identify an ambiguous wine origin and the elements used for its production by determining the right and specific molecular markers; whereas, a metagenomic approach appears more likely to characterize not only the entire biodiversity of this specific environment but also allow the determination of new molecular specific markers of the territory of origin through its representative constituent organisms.

The above mentioned logistic and biological systems in addition to quality and safety ones present an immense advantage of their integration altogether in order to establish a complete monitored food supply chain well manipulated, trustable by the consumer.