The European Commission has unveiled a new artificial intelligence platform, TraceMap, to speed up the detection of food fraud, contaminated food products and foodborne illness across the EU, the Commission said.
In line with the EU’s high safety standards for food and imported products, the new tool will strengthen consumer safety and help national authorities work more effectively by innovating how we assess, detect and respond to food safety risks and fraudulent activity.
TraceMap will use artificial intelligence to improve food safety risk assessments by simplifying access and analysis of key data, quickly establishing links between economic operators and shipments, and tracking the entire agri-food supply chain after risk is identified, enabling faster recalls of unsafe or fraudulent products.
From today, TraceMap is available to national authorities in all Member States, enabling them to better target controls and carry out more thorough investigations without the need for additional resources. It will use extensive data in existing EU agri-food systems to rapidly monitor trade patterns and production flows. The platform will improve inspection accuracy, speed up the detection of suspicious entities and help investigators detect food fraud and foodborne illness outbreaks and quickly remove non-compliant products from the market. TraceMap empowers Member States to remove gaps, address weaknesses and strengthen their measures to combat fraud in the agri-food sector. It will also enable better control of imported goods, in line with the enhanced measures set out in the vision for agriculture and food.
The Commission created TraceMap using artificial intelligence technology to process, structure and interpret data from different food safety management platforms across the EU, including the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) and the Trade Control and Expert System (TRACES). A pilot version of TraceMap was recently used to support the identification and recall of infant formula produced with contaminated ARA oil from China.
(Vijesti.ba)
