The chunk of Parmigiano Reggiano sitting in your fridge might have come from a microchipped cheese wheel. Don’t don your tin foil hat just yet, though; cheese makers aren’t interested in tracking your whereabouts. Instead, it’s all about tracking the wheels themselves.
Parmigiano Reggiano is the champagne of the cheese world. Although many cheeses are referred to as parmesan, authentic Parmigiano Reggiano is crafted from highly regulated milk in a specific region of Italy. Its elite status has prompted opportunistic cheese fraudsters to create copycat wheels and sell them to unwitting grocery chains and restaurants, generating nearly as much annual revenue as the Parmigiano Reggiano industry.
With p-Chip, Parmigiano Reggiano makers can finally fight back. p-Chip, unfortunately, doesn’t stand for “parmesan chip”; instead, it’s the name of a Chicago-based microtransponder company that shares its name with its flagship product. A single p-Chip is roughly the size of a grain of salt, allowing it to fit covertly within nearly any product—including a several-thousand-dollar wheel of cheese. Before shipping a wheel of Parmigiano Reggiano, makers embed a p-Chip in a casein label that melds with the wheel’s rind. Workers at each step of the supply chain can then scan the food-safe chip to confirm they have the correct product, offering Parmigiano Reggiano makers the opportunity to track a wheel’s last-known location and the amount of time it takes to reach the end of the chain.
The Consortium of Parmigiano Reggiano, an 89-year-old trade organization focused entirely on this variety of cheese, has spent the last few years testing the p-Chip for safety and reliability. Last year, the Consortium finally confirmed that it would partner with p-Chip by inserting microtransponders into 100,000 wheels of cheese.
“Since the establishment of our Consortium in 1934, we have worked to convey the value of our product globally and distinguish it from similar-sounding products on the market that do not meet our strict requirements for production and area of origin,” Consortium president Nicola Bertinelli said. “By being the first to incorporate these secure digital labels onto our cheese wheels, we can continue to ensure consumer safety, bringing the traceability and the authentication of our products to meet industry 4.0 technological targets.”
A p-Chip can tolerate temperatures ranging from -200 degrees Celsius (-328 Fahrenheit) to 500 degrees Celsius (932 Fahrenheit) and withstand g-forces up to 15,000 g’s. It can also survive microwaves and submersion in common solvents. While a wheel of Parmigiano Reggiano might not get up to such wild activities, p-Chip is also gunning for partnerships with the pharmaceutical, manufacturing, automotive, and electronics industries, which are known to treat their products a little differently than the nutty cheese you grate over your pasta.
In the meantime, other technologies promise to help food and beverage companies tackle fraud. Last year, IBM developed Hypertaste, an AI-powered electronic tongue that could determine the chemical makeup of a wine, whiskey, or other liquid with a quick dip. The University of Technology Sydney’s “e-nose” similarly detects counterfeit products by mimicking the human olfactory system.
