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Parmesan makers add microchips to cheese wheels to foil counterfeiters
- seydor 3y agoLooking forward to the subscription
- mauvehaus 3y agoRight. So you don't eat the rind. However, it's an outstanding addition to many soups, where you simmer it in the soup, and the soup takes on some of the delicious umami flavor of the Parmigiano. You then remove the rind before serving. What happens to the chip when we do that? Will it stay embedded in the rind after simmering for an hour or two? If not, will it pass through safely if I eat it?
- arbitrage 3y agoYou can eat the rind. Some people do. That's not typical, however. > The p-Chip micro-transponder is a grain of salt-sized silicon chip containing a unique identification code that is attached to the silicon substrate. It will probably be safe if it gets accidentally ingested.
- benoliver999 3y agoIf you go to Italy the airport scanners might think you're a wheel of cheese.
- shrubble 3y agoIf it happened to me the situation would really grate on me.
- anon4242 3y agoCheezes dad, go back to your woodworking!
- mathogre 3y agoWould that be........bad PR?
- aruggirello 3y agoNo, since you wouldn't appear to be counterfeit. :)
- nickthegreek 3y agoPretty little chip and can withstand 500°C. https://p-chip.com/about/ https://p-chip.com/about/
- junon 3y ago1) Most consumer grade chips are rated up to 80c-110c. EDIT: Ah you weren't naming any random chip, that's the chip they're using. My b. 2) That doesn't say if the chip gets dislodged, whether or not it's big enough to notice before someone swallows it. A grain of salt probably isn't. Hopefully the materials are safe to ingest. Horrendously irresponsible practice by the manufacturer, IMO.
- RajT88 3y agoThis is why they invented cheesecloth, no?
- zeitg3ist 3y agoThe rind can definitely be eaten, and it’s delicious. If you put it in soup like you said it becomes soft and chewy, but you can also grill it or eat it raw on its own (I do sometimes, after cleaning the surface with a knife). My grandma used to say it’s good for your teeth, which is probably not true.
- vinayan3 3y agoI hope that the grocery store who is splitting the wheel removes the rind area with the label. I don't like the idea of ingesting a eating a chip even if it's very very small.
- grumblepeet 3y agoAgreed. I’ve just eaten ragu following a recipe on YouTube that advised me to tuck the rind from the Parmesan into it before cooking the sauce for 3 hours. It completely broke down. Not fancying a chip in my pasta sauce.
- mathogre 3y agoI use parm rind (Parmigiano Reggiano rind) for a couple things. One is to make a parm broth for Fettuccine Alfredo. Another is when making a pomodoro sauce loaded with aromatics (garlic, red onion, fresh basil, etc). "Cheese buyers aren't going to eat this embedded label." Are you sure?
- stuaxo 3y agoSomebody said that "big Parma is putting tracking microchips into human beings".
- barkingcat 3y agothat is completely ok - after 10 years I can say that "I am 90% parmigiano" and prove it by scanning the thousands of chips that will be inside me.
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- compsciphd 3y agoI think the joke was "the conspiracy theorists, were so close to being right!, It's Big Parma that is putting microchips into all of us"
- hyperhopper 3y agoWhy can't we categorize things by quality rather than origin? I don't know why the EU has an obsession with further entrenching the big old rich companies. Same with champagne or chianti classico wine. Plus it's not like average consumers will have the hardware to verify this new custom chip. Even if it's "un-clonable" as they claim, which I doubt. So if they have to just go to the store and hope anyway, nothing's really changing.
- debesyla 3y agoWe can and we do. It's just that some product names are limited by origin - like a piece of (other) cultural art, food also has a locational history. But I do agree that maybe average customer don't care about that.
- sneak 3y agoIn the US at least, I am fairly certain that the vast majority of consumers fail to recognize any _categorical_ difference between "parmesan" cheese and "parmigiano-reggiano" cheese (except perhaps the price). Indeed, even the headline of this article about P-R just calls it "parmesan", which is the same non-DOP term used to refer to similar-style cheese produced in many other places (eg Hungary) and sold in the USA.
- wil421 3y agoMy three year old daughter can tell the difference. We keep reggiano on hand and if you give her an inferior Parmesan she will ask for the “good one”. My grocery store buys the wheels from Italy and it’s much better to grate it on demand.
- sneak 3y agoMy comment is not to say that people can't distinguish them, but that they are ignorant of the fact that "parmesan" is not DOP and "Parmigiano-Reggiano" is, and that they are not the same category.
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- tantalor 3y agoHow exactly does this "foil counterfeiters"? Is every buyer supposed to scan the chip and verify? Does that scale?
- Spoom 3y agoMy guess is that this is so e.g. US CBP can scan imported wheels that purport to be legitimate, and (eventually) reject counterfeits.
- crumpled 3y agoOne chip per wheel.. I think this is for further up the supply chain. Some importer claims to have a great deal on a specific cheese, is it the real deal? Personally, I'm fine with eating a Parmesan that says it's a slightly different Parmesan.
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- eli 3y agoThis is a "fun" story so it gets coverage far out of proportion to the actual product announcements... which is that in 2022 they put a chip in 100,000 wheels of cheese. Presumably a trial run that didn't progress any further in the following 9+ months? The use of blockchain here is very questionable and makes the rest of the product suspect to me. "The p-Chip is like a special anchor that uses blockchain technology to create a digital copy of real things" -> lol what? It's just a chip that returns a unique serial number when scanned? Seems like you could accomplish the same thing with an RFID tag (or possibly even a bar code sticker) along with a centralized database.
- trey-jones 3y agoThe article gives several reasons that p-Chip is the best candidate for this use case, and I think addresses your other question marks here as well. Did you read it? It's not very long.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nitwit005 3y agoThey clearly read the article, as they are citing numbers from it. You didn't read the hacker news guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- neilv 3y ago> Presumably a trial run that didn't progress any further in the following 9+ months? Having been in a similar anti-counterfeiting startup, a few years earlier, which got chips into a larger number of high-end products... It might well have been a pilot project, and those don't get renewed for a variety of reasons. In our case, Covid disrupted our awesome first customer's industry right after our very successful factory launch. Covid had cascading economic effects to vendors and programs, of course, and Covid also prevented much of the field auditing follow-through we'd planned on. Other ways this could fail, even without a black swan global pandemic: * It's enterprise/corporate sales, which is very difficult and energy-intensive. Even having a no-brainer value proposition doesn't mean a yes. It might take several months of stakeholder meetings and tentative commitments to realize the yes isn't actually imminent like it had seemed. We had a few successes (including landing two top brands), but closing deals arguably took at least as much energy and clever ideas as all our software+hardware+logistics engineering and service design did. * There might've been effort needed on the customer end, which didn't pan out. We minimized these dependencies, by, e.g., installing our own bespoke networked stations in their best factory, and adapting to their current factory order process, to be almost "zero impedence" (e.g., minimize new IT effort, minimize new corporate effort, minimize ways that dependencies can make mistakes). What a customer is willing and able to do varies from customer to customer (due to, e.g., what their processes and systems are, the nature of the product and how it's made and distributed and sold, various stakeholder motivations, etc.) so you have to tailor it. We thought hard and did a great "prescient" first pass at this for our pilot customer, preventing all sorts of things that could've/would've gone wrong, and still had to respond nimbly to many things we learned in the process. * You want to show business value from the pilot project, which means stopping some counterfeiting sales effort, or unmasking some gray market diversion. And probably being able to attach a dollar value to that, and/or least show defending goodwill/reputation of the brand (e.g., reduce negative reviews due to people receiving lower-quality counterfeits). This probably means field investigation, since you probably can't arrange for the end customer or intermediaries to do it (merely having the chip and some tracking data alone probably won't do it), which is tricky... but is when you actually get the payoff for all that effort.
- acyou 3y agoInitial reaction : cool! Subsequently: I am going to stop buying this stuff. I dont care about protecting the cartel, and want to punish them for this sort of behavior.
- delfinom 3y agoIn the EU, many foods fall under protected labeling law and it goes well beyond Parmesan and italy. I'm personally all for it, fuck the waste they sell in the US such as wood pulp with cheese flavoring sold as Parmesan.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> fuck the waste they sell in the US such as wood pulp with cheese flavoring sold as Parmesan The Parmesan they make in Wisconsin is closer to the cheese they made in Parma a hundred years ago than today’s Parmiggiano Reggiano [1]. Italy went through in a decade, after WWII, the wealth expansion Britain did over a century in its Industrial Revolution. A lot of “classic” Italian culture is carryover from America, e.g. carbonara, or modern mythology. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/6ac009d5-dbfd-4a86-839e-28bb44b2b64c https://www.ft.com/content/6ac009d5-dbfd-4a86-839e-28bb44b2b...
- kasey_junk 3y agoI suspect the commenter was thinking of 'grated parmesan' that is typically sold by Kraft at grocery stores in a green can. The quality Wisconsin Parmesan's are usually very very good, served in wheels or chunks like quality Reggiano (though as you mention a slightly different cheese to Parmiggiano Reggiano) and I don't know of anyone, Italian or otherwise that would describe them as 'wood pulp with cheese flavoring'.
- anon4242 3y agoSome years ago I was at a vineyard in Burgundy harvesting grapes that were sent to Champagne to be turned into Champagne (the sparkling wine). It's interesting how the labeling law can be misused when it suites the champions of the specific label...
- cies 3y agoActing hard on fakers basically says you add little value compared to them.
- ackfoobar 3y agoOr that the value cannot be verified before purchase.
- cies 3y agoSelling really bad fakes for the same price as real (as the price is known before purchase, otherwise it's called theft or deceiving) is not going to work. In this case cheese: you will never buy again if you find it tastes horribly different from what you expected.
- peteradio 3y ago"Batches 24-30 have produced an uptick in hospital visits! Producer: prove that it came from us."
- eschneider 3y agoI love chips with cheese, but not like that.
- SeanAnderson 3y agoI'm pleasantly surprised to see a real-world use case for blockchain tech going live.