Australia and NZ food and wine producers embrace technology to fight Chinese knock-offs

Wine and produce suppliers in Australia and New Zealand are looking to anti-counterfeiting technology to protect their business from Chinese knock-offs. Picture: Georges Gobet

AS CHINA’S middle class develops a taste for imported food and drink, produce suppliers in Australia and New Zealand are looking to anti-counterfeiting technology to protect their growing business from counterfeit foods.

Fruit and vegetable growers, wine producers and lamb farmers are teaming up with makers of tracking systems, codes and powders to combat fakes which cost the global food industry billions of dollars each year.

In China the popular WeChat app offers consumers a scanning tool which can determine if a food product on a Chinese shop shelf is from where it says it is. Small players __like meat company Silver Fern Farms and Synlait Milk have also asked local tech firms __like Dunedin’s Oritain, which measures food isotopes as a checkable ‘fingerprint’, but Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is also in on the act.

Alibaba is piloting a tracing system and has signed a partnership deal with Kiwi dairy giant Fonterra and Australian vitamin supplier Blackmores.

“We see the Australian and New Zealand markets setting the tone for the rest of the world when it comes to integrity, safety and quality of food supply chains,” Maggie Zhou, Alibaba’s Australia and New Zealand managing director said in Canberra in late March.

“It was a natural decision to pilot a program here.”

Dislodging counterfeit food is no small challenge with fraud costing as the world’s food industry an estimated $US40 billion ($A53 billion) a year, Alibaba said, citing Michigan State University research.

In China, $US1 billion in counterfeit goods were seized in 2014, according to the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition.

“Categories that are faked so regularly are the fresh produce ones where New Zealand and Australia are strong,” Mark Tanner, director of Shanghai-based China Skinny, a firm that advises Western businesses operating in China said.

But Australian and New Zealand firms are prepared to go to increasing lengths to protect sales they rely on for growth.

New Zealand’s total exports to China have quadrupled to NZ$12 billion ($A11 billion) since 2007, most of them being food and beverage products, while Australia agriculture exports to China were worth around A$10 billion in 2016, double the amount five years earlier.

The chief executive of Auckland manuka honey firm Oceania Natural Walker Zhong said with the backing of a Chinese insurer, it has created a tool through WeChat which sends Chinese consumers an alert if the scanned code had already been used before.