A discrimination system for identification of cultivated products by trace elements analysis - using Broccoli as an example

In Japan, places where agricultural products are cultivated or fishery products produced have recently begun to make their locality into a brand. To take advantage of this brand creation, some other producing districts camouflage their agricultural or fishery products to be sold as the branded district's goods with its attendant higher brand values; thus fraudulently raising their own prices. To prevent camouflaging of produce from non-branded producing districts, traceability systems that mark an ID on the packaging have been proposed. However, these traceability systems cannot prevent fraud within the systems themselves, such as the use of illegally acquired IDs. Therefore, we proposed a system that distinguishes the various places of cultivation of green groceries by analyzing very small quantities of trace elements in the cultivated products and then storing this information in a database. In this paper, we describe the outline and design of a system that discriminates the place of cultivation. We show that discrimination is possible by correlation analysis on the results of our trace elements analysis.