Food IT-Solutions contributes to high-tech automation of the pig industry of the future in China

About the project

To the Chinese regime, being the world’s largest pig producer and consumer, it is important to keep a healthy livestock and produce food safe meat. Much of the Chinese pork meat producers and abattoirs are a ‘family business’ that need to become more professional.

Because of our years of experience in automation and traceability in the meat industry, Food IT-solutions was contacted medio 2018 by a Chinese integrated business, specialising in animal feed, seed banks, hogs, sows, piglets, fattening and slaughtering. The capacity of this business is estimated at several times the size of the entire production volume of Belgium.

The owner expressed his ambition to implement innovative technology throughout the entire Chinese industry. Using their existing technology for facial recognition of pigs, Food IT-Solutions was tasked to design a solution to link the slaughter data of an animal to its parents’ data.

Even though modernising the Chinese meat industry is a big challenge, Food IT-Solutions was given the mandate to design the project, after an introduction and negotiation phase. Today, the entire process has been written up in detail: from sow, piglet, follow-up during the raising process, trade, slaughter and classification of the carcass to the eventual shipping to its end destination.

Gathering information

The most important information consists of data that can be traced back individually to the parents of each carcass, as well as the destination of each identified carcass.

The result

To guarantee food safety, tracking & tracing (following from source to destination and from destination to source) of pork products is necessary. Food IT-Solutions delivered the design for this system.