Connected champagne putting a cork in bogus bubbly

"In 2016, we didn't print any connected labels. In

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2019 we'll be at one million! The market has doubled each year," said Arnold Deregnaucourt, head of Billet, a company which has specialised in printing labels for champagne bottles for more than a century.

While a number of firms like Adents, Antares Vision and Tesa Scribos offer food and beverage makers a way to track their goods, Billet hopes that its long history working with the champagne industry will give it an advantage in adapting the technology to its practices.

Laurent Berns, founder of TraceAWine, a technology startup that has acquired Billet, said QR codes are sufficient for smaller champagne houses, but for those with production lines that handle more than 12,000 bottles per hour the RFID emitters are added to speed up the process as they allow for scanning bottles inside boxes.

With a QR code and RFID emitter on each bottle carrying a unique code, which is linked to a unique internet address, one can track the journey each bottle makes from the champagne house to your house. Or not.

"We can detect anomalies like, for example, a bottle which is scanned in Britain but then ends up in Russia," said Berns. "Our system will alert the client."

Champagne houses, like other makers of luxury products, don't only worry about outright counterfeiting, but controlling their supply chains to ensure prices aren't undercut in parallel or grey markets.

Foiling counterfeiters

This is something that the owner of the Pierre Peters champagne house, located in the heart of the prestigious Cote de Blancs region, knows about all too well.

https://phys.org/news/2019-06-champagne-cork-bogus.html