Since organic products sell for higher prices than conventional ones, the organic sector is highly attractive for fraudsters. Check Organic offers you an easy-to-use online solution to prove that you are not one of them, and that you are willing to actively reveal food fraud at its very source. The tool maps and links certification and transaction and transformation data of organic raw products and processed products in real-time. A conversion factor specifies the transformation during primary processing, e.g. where olives are pressed to olive oil.
Based on the certified organic acreage, expected yield and actual trading and processing transactions, the system calculates a mass balance and checks the plausibility of produced vs. sold organic quantities, displaying your and your suppliers' integrity status via an intuitive traffic light system. With a few clicks, you can get an overview of complex supply chains and view your own and your suppliers' available product volumes. The system makes all information relevant for a purchase decision available through a comprehensive dashboard.
If you are worried about false deliveries and transformations, mislabelling, additives, substitutes, dilution and contamination, Check Organic hac set your mind at ease. It helps you to detect fraud within supply chains, reducing your risk profile and protecting your reputation. Your transparency and proficiency ideally prepare you for audits and inspections, even on short notice. Digitising your certification and transaction data within the online platform prevents you from losing precious data, which is safely stored with an ISO-certified Austrian hosting provider. To secure proprietary company data, your business connections cannot be viewed by competitors.
With Check Organic, you minimise compliance problems and product recalls whilst saving money at the same time. The non-analytical approach to detect irregularities is much less expensive than extensive lab-testing. It further reduces your administrative workload by saving you precious time that you would usually need to check certificates or phone up certifiers in order to validate your business partner's integrity. If irregularities are detected, Check Organic's mapping tool makes it easy for you to get a quick overview of all parties involved in a product's supply chain, allowing for efficient communication and investigation.
By uploading your data into Check Organic, your business becomes more accessible and visible to the industry. The platform allows you to connect to potential business partners worldwide whilst displaying integrity and professionalism. Your business partners will appreciate your level of transparency, which strongly differentiates you from your competitors.
To access and manage her data in Check Organic, Lisa gets on her computer and logs into the Web Portal with her username and password.
Her data, such as contact details, range of products, applied certification standards and correlating certification status, as well as information on her designated certification body, are stored safely in Check Organic.
As Lisa wants to give her business partners a good impression of what she does, she uses the Check Organic file upload to provide additional documents which underpin her integrity (such as photos from her products, warehouse or production facility, analysis reports, etc.)
In order to book transactions and document her business relations in Check Organic, Lisa manages her suppliers in lists and thereby sets up her supply chains in the system. In case she has a supply shortage from one of her farmers, she can search the Check Organic database to find alternative suppliers and integrate them in her supply chains.
Within a few clicks, Lisa can visualise her supply chains. Instead of working with complex calculation sheets and its error-prone diagrams, she uses Check Organic to get a quick overview of her supply structures. Here, she can see all involved actors with their respective integrity status (one traffic light for the certification check, one for the mass balance check). Practically, she can have them all displayed within a simple graph or even localised on a world map.
Every time Lisa buys tomatoes from her farmers, she creates a transaction in Check Organic and thereby neatly documents her purchases. During the production process at her facility, all transformations (such as cleaning, peeling, etc.), are registered, too, whilst conversion factors assure a plausible ratio between product input and product output. Finally, she proudly sells the result of all the hard work - her organic tomato sauce - to her clients. Obviously, she documents these sales in Check Organic.
In the background, Check Organic automatically calculates a mass balance that compares whether Lisa's own and the organic production capabilities of her suppliers match. If all is well, she can relax.
A traffic light displays both her suppliers’ certification checks as well as the mass balance checks of each delivery and transformation. If all is green, she can be sure that nobody has tried to trick her and that her production is running smoothly. If the traffic light is yellow or red, something is wrong with her suppliers down the line and Lisa needs to trigger investigations. If the traffic light is grey, more information is required.
Ever since Lisa uses Check Organic, she has established a new routine: she starts her working day with a quick glimpse at the Check Organic Dashboard. It provides a great overview about her own and the integrity status of her suppliers. This way, she knows right away if there are any irregularities that require investigation.
Lisa spends a lot of time down on the production line - she can't sit in front of her computer all day checking if any traffic lights are going yellow or red. In order for her to be always up to date, she receives notifications from Check Organic that inform her about any status changes.
At a BIOFACH 2020 congress event which was organised by our director Gerald A. Herrmann, Gwendolyn Wyard, OTA Vice President for Regulatory and Technical Affairs, presented the OTA's Organic Fraud Prevention Guide. Read on...
During the same session, Beat Wiederkehr, general manager of YACAO, presented together with his consultant Roman Hipper why his cocoa company is a best practice model when it comes to transparency, traceability and accountability among grower groups. Click below for more information, videos and slides...
Do you buy raw materials from small-scale farmers? Discover our online-tool Group Integrity, improve your Internal Control System (ICS) and connect your data to Check Organic.