Pomì Trace: A Guarantee for Consumers

Pomì trace is the traceability system that enables all consumers to find out the origin of Pomì tomatoes, a well-known brand of the Casalasco Tomato Consortium, directly from the website www.pomionline.it. The IT system was designed to be user-friendly, specifically to encourage its adoption: by using the production lot number found on the packaging, consumers can identify the farms that supplied the raw ingredients for each individual package of pulp and passata. Pomì Trace is part of the broader traceability system of the Casalasco Consortium, which monitors the entire tomato supply chain.

And because the wholesomeness and food safety of Pomì products are on the top list of the Casalasco Tomato Consortium's core values, a system of state-of-the-art laboratories has also been developed in recent years to conduct process, environmental, and finished product analyses. In 2020, for example, an average of: 7,635 chemical-physical analyses were performed daily on products in processing, equivalent to 5 analyses per minute; 2,187 microbiological analyses were performed daily on finished products, equivalent to 1.5 analyses per minute; and 405 multi-residue analyses were performed on processed tomatoes, equivalent to 6.8 per day.

The Consortium's traceability system allows for constant and documented monitoring regarding: soil characteristics and treatments; tomato origin (farm, seed variety and lot, plot of origin); date and time of delivery, start and end of processing; packaging supplier and lot; results of laboratory analyses in the field and in production; storage and shipping warehouse; and the route and destination of the shipped product.

Furthermore, the Casalasco Tomato Consortium places the utmost importance on all aspects of sustainability (environmental, social, and economic), as evidenced by the third Sustainability Report recently presented, which highlights significant performance improvements across various areas achieved during 2020. Specifically, the national supply chain was further strengthened, with nearly all purchases made from suppliers based in Italy, thereby supporting the local economy and reducing the environmental impact of transportation through the qualification of 71% of new suppliers based on environmental criteria and 65% on social criteria. The company's average annual number of employees increased significantly, particularly during the tomato processing season, rising from 1,613 to 1,770 units, marking a substantial 10% increase in employment, primarily benefiting female staff. The report also highlights 40 fully completed research and development projects focusing on new product types, recipes, and studies on low-environmental-impact packaging, partly thanks to collaborations with accredited external institutions and universities. The economic value generated and distributed among the Consortium's various stakeholders in 2020 was 308 million euros, a 10% increase compared to the previous year, resulting in the production and distribution of over half a billion packages of finished product on the international market.

The full Sustainability Report can be downloaded at the Link.