Written by: Andrea Adelmo Della Penna
From: WIISE
The WASTELESS case studies are over, but we would like to present the opinions of some of the companies that participated in the testing of the digital tools and innovative methodologies developed by the project to measure and monitor the generation of food waste throughout the supply chain.
In this article, we report on the experience of Virginia Ruspolini, a young Italian agricultural entrepreneur, and her company Apincampo . Virginia studied agricultural sciences in Perugia, and decided to follow her aspirations and passions, handed down by her beekeeper grandfather. As can be seen from the name Apincampo (Bees in the field), there is a beekeeping activity for the production of local honey from the Umbria region (central Italy), and a farming activity with the cultivation of soft wheat, spelt, chickpeas and olives for oil, with which she produces various processed products such as flour, pasta, creams, oil.
Virginia got to experience the blockchain-based electronic register (PR1) developed by WIISE on the pasta she produces, and the Surplus Measurement and Management Tool (PR2) developed by FAZLA on the entire product range of Apincampo’s point-of-sale directly to the public as retail.
By filling out the survey to enter the company’s pasta data into the blockchain register, Virginia was able to discover the economic value of bran and other by-products of the milling industry, normally given free of charge to a farmer close to her farm. A good practice, but one that can be directed differently as a new resource for farm economic sustainability and valorise these by-products from feed to food.
In the case of the Surplus Measurement and Management Tool, it is certainly useful to have some suggestions on how to use the surplus on the farm. It already performs very well in this respect (e.g. turning chickpeas into chickpea creams, avoiding disposal and adding value), but this is not the case for all farms. Therefore, the tool can be useful for those operators who do not yet adopt prevention and valorisation measures on the farm.
The overall evaluation of the experience is positive. The only criticism regarding the use of the tools relates to the complexity that can be associated with digitisation, which is not accessible to all users (many farmers or operators in the area are elderly or otherwise uneducated). Furthermore, the survey for the blockchain and the system for entering products into the Surplus Tool is not very intuitive. Finally, given the limited time available to entrepreneurs such as Virginia, it would be important to have more autonomous tools at their disposal, and to be able to provide additional value added to food waste information alone (e.g. internal accounting).
In the event of a simplification and enhancement of the tools, there is ample interest in continuing to use them at Apincampo.