EC Unveils AI Tool to Fight Agri-Food Alerts and Food Fraud

The European Commission has unveiled a new AI platform named TraceMap. It should accelerate the detection of food fraud, contaminated food, and foodborne disease outbreaks across the EU.

In line with the EU's high safety standards for food and imported products, this new tool will reinforce consumer safety and help national authorities work more effectively by innovating on how we assess, detect, and respond to food safety risks and fraudulent activity. TraceMap will use AI to improve food safety risk assessments by streamlining access and analysing critical data, rapidly identifying links between operators and consignments, and monitoring the entire agri-food supply chain, once a risk is identified, enabling faster recalls of unsafe or fraudulent products.

TraceMap is accessible to national authorities in all Member States, allowing them 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 at a fast pace. The platform will improve screening accuracy, speed up the detection of suspicious operators, help investigators detect food fraud and food-borne outbreaks, and remove non-compliant products from the market quickly. It will also enable better control of imported goods.

The solution has been created by the EC, 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.