This is a paper describing how the Swiss dairy industry encodes a signature within the cheese itself.
I find the parallel with digital signature interesting because it uses a similar scheme: the "public key" is the presence/absence of a set of strains of bacteria, and the "private key" is a (secret) set restriction enzyme used to identify the strain.
The paper mentions isotopic analysis [1] for authenticity and origin, which fascinates me because of the breadth of applicability - even into criminal investigations of biological material to determine where you have been living.
And to see if the “bio-identical” anabolic steroids (or other performance enhancing drugs) in your body were created in your (or someone’s…) body, or in a lab.
(Basically radio carbon dating, but against a subset of a molecule rather than the whole thing).
I keep hearing about problems in food authenticity (e.g. fake olive-oil). I want the quality of my food to be auditable (is it really organic? Was it really grown in country X? Are these eggs really free-range?) and this seems like a step in that direction.
It's already employed in Switzerland (the second part of the paper describe the result of a routine check from a supermarket). Switzerland is a small market, but not that small.
My 30-years vision would be, I walk into whole foods, I scan a QR code on the back of smoothie and I see all of the following:
- list of ingredients
- processing summary (was it reduced to a powder or liquid concentrate at some point frozen?)
- list of growth locations for every ingredient, pesticides used
- batch #
- additional health information (PH)
- What time it was made at the factory, and where
Funny coincidence, I was in Switzerland last week and indeed the cheese industry there is huge, and tasty.
The thing though, I got to sample a Brie cheese made in Switzerland but I thought anything named Brie could only come from France?
Nevertheless it was the most amazing cheese I had, much more bouncy and not runny or flaccid like President or Kolibrie brand. I asked the staff where I could buy it but they said it's a local product from Interlaken. :(
"Brie" is not a protected label. Some specific variants are protected (Brie de Meaux and Brie de Melun from France, not sure if any non-French ones are)
What you describe make me think of Tomme Vaudoise[1] (widely available in Swiss supermarket). It's a little bit firmer than a classic french Brie (it really depends on how old it is and how long you let it rest out of the fridge).
But this is from the french part of Switzerland, I'm not aware of any well known soft chesse from the german part. But then small cheese production in not unheard of in Switzerland; you having it may be very well be in fact a local production (think nano-brewery, but for cheese).
Coverage for these things goes farther thanks to various international treaties about mutual recognition of them, I believe Switzerland has joined at least some of them. Either way, "Brie" is not a protected label so it doesn't matter.
Sounds like they are banking on keeping the "proof-of-origin" culture under tight control, distributed only to authorized cheese manufacturers. This is similar to how AACS decryption keys are only distributed to authorized Blu-Ray equipment manufacturers.
It's a matter of effort. Counterfeit bluray are useless without the keys, counterfeit cheese is indistinguishable to the average consumer. You're not going to have the best and brightest biologists in the world competing for the glory of cracking Cheese DRM.
Decryption keys generally aren't broken by the best and brightest cryptographers, they're leaked somehow. The same would apply here. If the real cheese sells for more than competitors, there's economic incentive.
They also may not publish the DNA sequence they are using, or they may have more than one sequence and only publish one of them. Presumably it has to be in a highly conserved region of the bacterial genome (or present in a few highly conserved places).
From what I understand they use insertion sequence element[1] combined with a given set of restriction enzyme to produce a fingerprint. They had to find strains that produced a unique fingerprint given their set of restriction enzyme.
> they may have more than one sequence and only publish one of them
In fact that's exactly what they do. From the "7. Risk of Duplication of the Proof-of-origin Culture" section of the paper:
> And last but not least, the proof-of-origin culture consists of more than one traceable strain.The composition of the mixture is changed (rotation principle) from time to time in accordance with the interprofessional cheese organization.
I just came across a company yesterday that is using engineered microbes (with a kind of bar code coded in them) as tracers for food. Personally it sounds a bit icky.
Some of my American peers here on HN may be as surprised as I was when I first found out that there's more than one - the - Swiss Cheese. I mean, you know, the one with the holes!...
Forget Europe, half the "cheese" in America is not even legally allowed to be called cheese but America and needs to be called "pasteurized milk product" and comes in spray cans.
lol. I did my Chemical Laboratory Assistant Apprenticeship at exactly this place and my uncle just retired as a Chemist 5 months ago, working at Agroscope Liebefeld for over 30 years.
