How does food actually get to the consumer and what are the stops along the way?
When it comes to food, many people make conscious purchasing decisions based on a variety of influence factors such as quality, regionality, sustainability, ingredients or production processes. However, this information is often not available to the buyer at all or only to a limited extent. With the Digital Product Passport, the European Union has announced a concept that aims to make the economy more sustainable and transparent.
To bring this idea to life, the project "Digital Product Passport for Secure Information Exchange in the Supply Chain", or DiPP for short, was launched at the beginning of June 2023. To realize the idea, the project partners are relying on a combination of digital twin and distributed ledger technology. Here, the Asset Administration Shell is a key technology for a dynamic information model, while the distributed ledger technology portion ensures transparency and tamper-resistance. "By combining these technologies, we hope the result will be a Digital Product Passport that enables the best possible information transparency along the supply chain while protecting competition-critical know-how of the stakeholders," says project leader Prof. Henning Trsek. The consortium is made up of globally active companies from various sectors along the food supply chain. In June, all partners met for the kick-off in Lemgo, thus laying the foundation for the next three years of the project. As one of eight impulse projects, the project complements the research field of the Smart Food Technology OWL initiative. The results from all projects will be combined in Future Food Factory to create a vision for the future of food production.