The European Commission launched a new artificial intelligence (AI) platform on 10 March, TraceMap, to accelerate the detection of food fraud, contaminated food and foodborne disease outbreaks across the EU. TraceMap is accessible to national authorities in all Member States,.
TraceMap will use AI to:
- Improve food safety risk assessments by streamlining access and analysing critical data.
- Rapidly identify links between operators and consignments.
- Monitor the entire agri-food supply chain, once a risk is identified, enabling faster recalls of unsafe or fraudulent products.
The intent is to enable national authorities to better target controls and carry out more thorough investigations, without requiring additional resources. It will use the extensive data in the existing EU agri-food systems to track trade patterns and production flows. The platform will improve screening accuracy, speed up the detection of suspicious operators and help investigators to detect food fraud and food borne outbreaks and remove non-compliant products from the market quickly. It will enable better control of imported goods, in line with the strengthened measures set out in the Vision for Agriculture and Food.
TraceMap has been created by the Commission, using AI technology that processes, structures and interprets data from different food safety management platforms across the EU, including the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) and Trade Control and Expert System (TRACES). A pilot version of TraceMap was recently used to support the identification and recall of infant milk formula made with contaminated ARA oil from China.
Photo by Mario Verduzco on Unsplash
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