1. Why trace olive oil
One bottle, many hands
Before it reaches your table, oil passes through the person who picks the olives, the one who presses them, the one who analyses the oil and the one who bottles it. If a step is written nowhere, nobody can say for sure what happened.
Like a family recipe with no ingredients written down: the dish is good, but if someone gets ill you do not know what to check.
Three reasons to keep a record
1. Fraud. Lower-grade oil sold as extra virgin, or a blend of different origins presented as coming from a single area, are among the best-known food frauds in the sector. A record of the steps makes it harder to slip in foreign oil without leaving a trace.
2. Recalls. If a lot has a problem, you need to know which bottles belong to it and pull only those from the shelves, not every bottle the producer sells.
3. Trust. Buyers want to check for themselves instead of relying only on the label.
What European law asks
Regulation (EC) No 178/2002 (Article 18) requires food businesses to be able to say who supplied them with a product and to whom they supplied it. It is called the "one step back, one step forward" rule: each operator knows the supplier just before and the customer just after. The regulation also covers withdrawing unsafe products from the market. A separate rule, Directive 2011/91/EU, asks that prepackaged foods carry a lot number, the code that says which production the bottle belongs to (with some exceptions).
This rule does not require a blockchain or a QR code: it says what must be recorded, not with which tool. Some consortia and producers already use QR codes to tell the origin of their products; our demo shows one possible way.
In this course the "Pietre di Vita" mill is fictional, so we can show everything without real data.
Try it yourself
Take a bottle of oil from your kitchen. Find the lot number (usually a short code near the best-before date) and note what else the label tells you about the oil's journey.
What you learned
- Tracing means writing down who did what and when.
- EU law asks you to know the supplier and customer of each step, and the lot appears on the packaging.
- A record helps against fraud and allows targeted recalls.