Parmesan Makers Add Microchips To Cheese Wheels To Foil Counterfeiters

Big Parma! 🤣

Also real quick

The trackers are in the shell which you don't eat (or aren't supposed to eat)

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Some foods do have specific, regional character. Is the milk or yeast from the next county over going to make a cheese that tastes the same? Idk but you can get very similar styles of cheese made elsewhere.

That all being said, I can see why calling same thing Parmesan when it's not from Parma, is not entirely truthful, if consumers care about origin. Which in the EU they certainly do.

We are focusing on both, afaik. I'm pretty sure the doc/aop/igp qualifications relate to quality as well as geography. It's not just about the location.

And there's nothing stopping anyone from making a better cheese, naming it whatever else other than a trademarked name and building a reputation for quality. So I don't see what the issue is.

Edit: happy now?

You have a good point. At the same time, I'd like to pay what I think I'm getting. If someone is selling me something and making me think it's something else, I think that's wrong.

Can only judge quality by trademarks and place of origin is essentially an extension of trademark. I don't really have a problem with it.

I for one really do not care whether it's called Parmesan or Parmigiano Regiano. Good cheese is good cheese.

As long as the counterfeit cheese meets all production regulations and is safe to eat I dont care. But the truth is the counterfeit probably cut amlot of corners and isn't that safe and if people get sick will be much harder to track and prevent future issues.

I am ok with “imitations” that follow the same process but it gets really specific when it’s about the weather in a specific region making. You can reproduce the same environment and bacterias but to get it just like the original it’s probably a lot more difficult than to make the product in its traditional “authentic” setting. Unless it allows increased production it’s difficult to see how it would be commercially viable. So in practice they cut corners and it’s not as good as the real one.

I think the appeal here is the chip is uncloneable, unlike ordinary rfid tags, so counterfeit products can't just clone it serial number. I wonder how useful it is in practice though. Unlike RFID tags which can be scanned by phones, customers probably don't have the proprietary scanner in hand to scan this chip, right? How do you know your cheese wheel is fake or not in that situation. You'll probably have to trust the store you bought it from, but if the store want to sell fake product, adding this chip to real products probably won't prevent those fraudulent stores from selling fake products to their customers. Am I missing something here?

Not near field, since it uses photovoltaic cells with a pulsed laser for power.

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Cheesing through demons, hell yeah

There was a level in Bubsy Bobcat called cheese wheels of doom... Prescient

They were members of the wheel group

they were know as the hacker 4cheese

That's pretty cool even without the cheesy factor

They make it somewhere else, and pass it off as if it’s made in a region with a protected name. For example, making sparkling wine in California and saying it’s champagne.

omg cheese fraud is real??

They're edible