Ten houses, one standard: EU-compliant traceability for Southern Italian herbs.
A family protected-cropping herb grower in south-eastern Sicily moved from paper spray logs and manual recall drills to batch-level digital passports — on FarmCloud and FoodPass.
At a glance
In the EU, traceability is not optional.
For a European grower, batch traceability is the price of admission to the supermarket shelf:
- Reg. (EC) No 178/2002 requires every food business operator to keep "one step back, one step forward" records for all produce.
- Retail standards (GLOBALG.A.P., IFS, BRCGS) contractually demand documented batch traceability and a demonstrable rapid-recall capability.
- Fresh-cut and ingredient buyers need batch-level identity preservation to print origin on their own labels.
- Italy adds product-specific origin and quality labelling rules on top of the EU baseline.
The operating requirement is blunt: when a buyer or an auditor asks "where did this punnet come from?", the grower must answer fast — with evidence.
Growing well, but proving it slowly.
Paper in the tunnel
Spray and fertigation records were handwritten inside each house, then reconciled by hand at audit time — a process measured in days.
1–2 days to answer one question
Identifying which house, harvest date and operator produced a given batch meant digging through paper and spreadsheets.
Manual, untested recalls
Recall rehearsals were on paper and rarely run. Each new retail customer meant a fresh, manual compliance burden.
Flying blind on water & nutrients
Irrigation ran on a fixed calendar, with no field-level visibility of soil moisture, EC or crop demand across the houses.
One platform across the whole crop cycle.
FarmPortal™
- Georeferenced maps and crop plans for all 10 houses
- Offline-first mobile records inside the tunnels
- Digital spray & fertigation logbook
- Soil-moisture / EC probes + on-site weather station
- Disease-risk and harvest-window alerts
- Season-on-season crop history per house
FoodPass™
- Digital passport for every harvest batch
- Automated delivery calendar with the packer
- Intake quality gating & contract settlement
- Trace-back / trace-forward across the chain
- Consumer QR — farm of origin, harvest date, grower
- Auditor QR — full evidence pack on demand
AgroSell™
Input procurement — seed, fertigation products and packaging — linked directly to crop plans and seasonal budgets.
AgriInsights™
Heat-unit (GDD) harvest forecasting, water and energy reporting, and buyer-ready ESG reporting built from live field data.
Plants, people and data — one connected loop.
Nothing here is theoretical. Sensors and people capture what actually happens in the house; the platform turns it into a batch record; and that record travels to the shelf as a scannable passport. Same soil, same people — now with a data trail behind every punnet.
Herb houses, mapped and recorded bed by bed.
Soil moisture, EC and weather captured automatically.
Harvest and pack logged in seconds — offline-capable.
Every batch becomes a scannable FoodPass passport.
Each of the ten houses carries its own crop plan, history and harvest calendar.
Soil moisture, EC and weather station data feed FarmPortal — and drive the irrigation advice.
Harvest and packing are logged in seconds on a phone — and sync when signal returns.
The agronomist sees block-level conditions, alerts and harvest forecasts in one view.
At intake the batch gets its passport — variety, house, harvest time, cold chain, inputs.
Premium and exotic lines carry the identical passport as the volume salad herbs.
The herb range — every line traced
Produce photography: Australian Cultivated Herbs
Each line above would carry its own FoodPass batch — the same passport structure as the Sicilian reference deployment, applied to the Australian range.
Proven over the first two seasons.
A verifiable passport from field to shelf.
✓ A batch-level digital passport for every harvest, verifiable end-to-end.
✓ A consumer QR that reveals farm of origin, harvest date and grower.
✓ An auditor QR that surfaces the complete evidence pack on demand.
✓ Recall isolation in minutes, not days — protecting brand and margin.
✓ Built for Reg. (EC) 178/2002 and retail standards (GLOBALG.A.P. / IFS / BRCGS).
✓ Interoperable with packers, wholesale markets and buyers.
The same principle that powers agrosell.eu — identity-preserved batches, verifiable provenance and open interoperability — now applied to fresh produce.
See the trace record itself.
Two illustrative FoodPass™ passports from the Erbe del Sud deployment — a protected greenhouse basil batch and a premium exotic herb (green shiso) batch, each traceable from field to shelf.
Genovese Basil — fresh cut
Protected cultivation · batch ERS-BAS-2604 · harvested 06.05.2026
- Organisation, location & certification
- Fertilization, plant protection & irrigation log
- Audits, lab tests, CO₂ & water footprint
Shiso / Perilla (green) — premium
Protected cultivation · organic · batch ERS-SHI-2606
- High-value specialty herb for premium food service
- Organic inputs & full treatment history
- Audits, lab tests, CO₂ & water footprint
The EU standard, available at home.
In Australia, fresh herbs supplied to supermarkets, bought at wholesale markets, or delivered direct to Coles or Woolworths are not yet bound by a single mandated batch-traceability standard — much of the chain still runs on paper, invoices and spreadsheets.
FoodPass lets Australian growers adopt the EU gold standard voluntarily — building the discipline that unlocks EU and UK export, and getting ahead of the regulation that will inevitably follow.
The Sicilian model transfers directly to Northern NSW: frost-free, warm-season protected cropping with production calendars that mirror those of the Mediterranean.
EU vs AU — traceability today
Mandatory batch traceability (Reg. 178/2002) plus contractual retail standards. Traceability is a condition of supplying supermarkets.
No single mandated standard for fresh herbs to retail yet. Supplier traceability is increasingly expected — but often manual.
The EU gold standard, available now — for domestic retail differentiation and export readiness.
From Ragusa to the Northern Rivers.
The playbook that took Erbe del Sud to sub-60-second trace-back transfers directly to Australian herb growers — and the commercial upside here is larger, because almost no one is doing it yet. Our first Australian deployment is Australian Cultivated Herbs (acherbs.com.au): a Northern NSW grower on Bundjalung country, producing fresh-cut herbs, bush foods and signature mixes and supplying supermarket chains, wholesale agents and independent retailers nationally.
Where the business stands
- ✕No software, no tracing. Batch history lives on paper, invoices and in people's memory.
- ✕Retail QA questions ("which block, which harvest, which day?") take hours or days to answer.
- ✕Recall capability is untested and would be manual — a genuine commercial risk.
- ✕Irrigation runs on habit, not data — water and energy use can't be evidenced.
- ✕A strong "Australian grown / harvested fresh" story that cannot yet be proven on the pack.
What the EU playbook delivers
- ✓Every fresh-cut batch becomes a passport — variety, block, harvest date/time, cold chain, inputs.
- ✓FarmPortal maps the blocks and digitises spray, fertigation and harvest records — offline-capable in the field.
- ✓A QR on every pack turns "harvested fresh" into a verifiable claim the shopper can check.
- ✓Bush foods get a traceable provenance story — a premium differentiator no competitor can copy.
- ✓AgriInsights puts hard numbers behind the closed-loop, water- and energy-efficiency claim — ESG-ready for retail tenders.
The competitive advantage
Win and hold supermarket listings
Retail supplier programs increasingly score traceability, recall speed and sustainability reporting. FoodPass makes ACH the supplier that answers instantly — and the one buyers stop worrying about.
Recall in minutes, not days
Isolate a suspect batch and its destination in under a minute. In a recall, speed protects the brand — and the shelf space.
Provable provenance on the pack
A scannable QR proving Australian-grown, harvest-dated, cold-chain-verified produce. For bush foods, a respectful, traceable origin story that commands a premium.
Export-ready overnight
The same passports satisfy EU, UK and Asian buyer requirements — opening premium export markets that are closed to growers who can't trace.
Leaner production
Sensor-led irrigation and harvest forecasting follow the EU trajectory: less water, less energy, less waste — margin that drops straight to the bottom line.
First-mover in the category
The first Australian herb grower with EU-grade traceability becomes the benchmark every competitor, buyer and auditor is measured against.
First AU deployment — targets
MODELLED ON THE EU DEPLOYMENTForward-looking modelled scenario for our first Australian deployment. Where today's state is drawn from Australian Cultivated Herbs' public positioning (acherbs.com.au), the uplift figures are targets modelled on the EU reference deployment, not achieved results. In Australia there is no mandated batch traceability for fresh herbs yet — which is exactly why moving now is an advantage, not just compliance.
Want this level of traceability for your operation?
Talk to our Australian team about a FoodPass pilot for your packhouse, herb farm or receiving facility.
European reference case study. Client profile and commercial figures are representative of FarmCloud's Southern European protected-cropping deployments and are provided for illustration.