Researchers in Japan have released a new mobile ingredient tracking app to help small farms and boutique producers provide consumers farm-to-table transparency.

In many countries, food certification systems provide consumers with information about where the goods they're buying came from and how they were produced, but often prohibitive implementation and labor costs exclude small-scale producers.

Certification systems can also be exploited by sellers who forge certificates or logos of authenticity.

The prototype app, detailed Monday in the journal Nature Food, promises to make certification more accessible.

"Our motivation was to design a food tracking system that is cheap for smallholder farmers, convenient for consumers, and can prevent food fraud," Kaiyuan Lin, doctoral student at the University of Tokyo and first author of the new study, said in a news release.

The new food-tracking program begins with the harvest of primary ingredients, like soybeans on a small farm. The farmer uses the app to enter details about the amount and variety of harvested soybeans. The app generates a QR code to be printed and attached to the sacks of soybeans.

Once sold, a truck driver scans the QR code and provides transportation information. Likewise, the merchant uses the app to enter details about the crop's location and storage.

The merchant can then use the QR code to provide buyers information about the soybeans' origin and journey.

"My mission is to make sure the system is not lying to you," said Lin. "Data are recorded in our digital system only when transactions happen person-to-person in the real, physical world, so there can be no fraud."

If a merchant tried to created a counterfeit QR code, farmers would be able to notice the product duplication in the app and flag the fraud.

Buyers who turn multiple ingredients into a new food product would be able to combine multiple ingredient QR codes into a new, single QR code. If adopted, the app would allow farmers to see whether their harvested crops end up.

"We think tracking their ingredients will appeal to farmers' sense of craftsmanship and pride in their work," said Lin.

Researchers used open-source software to develop the app. The program operates using a peer-to-peer or multi-master database, which means control and data storage across the phones and computers of all the system's users.

The researchers suggest the program's decentralized infrastructure makes it harder to manipulate. Lin and his research partners hope the the app will help democratizing food systems.

For now, the program is only a prototype and isn't ready to be rolled out at scale.

"We have created a prototype demonstration of the infrastructure for a new system of accurate food traceability," said Lin. "Before we can all use the app on our next grocery shopping trip, computer coders and user interface designers will have to build the app and farmers will need printers for QR code stickers."

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