The coming decades will experience a drastic revolution in food production with the massive introduction of innovative technologies (sensors, ICT, the Cloud, microelectronics, wireless networks), that are already being applied in the industrial sector (so-called “Industry 4.0”). The purpose is clear: to improve productivity and product quality, and to reduce costs for companies, to everyone’s benefit (including the environment). Hence the project, “Traceability 2.0”, with the aim of providing the consumer with a complete tracking tool “From Field to Table”. The next step in the SISSPre concept is to extend the “Traceability 2.0” project to include agricultural supply chains other than extra virgin olive oil.

The first SISSPre case study is the extra virgin olive oil (EVO) supply chain. Olive oil has been a typical Italian product for thousands of years and today is affected by a serious lack of transparency in the quality and traceability of each single product. At the moment, Italy is the second largest producer of extra virgin olive oil (after Spain) in terms of quantity of oil produced, but holds the world record for the number of cultivars officially registered in its territory (almost 500). This biodiversity, however, is not adequately exploited and Italian producers of high quality oil are seriously damaged to the advantage of large multinational companies that produce “standard” oil that lacks any territorial – and hence any cultivar – characteristic.