Selinko, the Belgian company specializing in digital authentication of products, has teamed with NXP Semiconductors, to extend its range of secure NFC tags to provide a solution adapted for great vintages, as well as for all other wine categories.
Just under a year after announcing the adoption of Selinko technology for its vintages, Fabien Geantet, owner of the highly respected Geantet-Pansiot estate in Gevrey-Chambertin, has announced his intention to extend his collaboration and protect his entire production by equipping each bottle with a unique, secure NFC tag from NXP, which can be authenticated using the Selinko mobile app.
Selinko platform combined with NXP’s MIFARE Ultralight C chip will enable the estate to safeguard its distribution network in order to protect its wines from counterfeiting, combat gray markets and also to communicate with its customers directly and in a targeted manner. The customers, for their part, will be able to authenticate their bottle and obtain information about the wine like vintage, production, serving temperature and storage etc., and the estate, by tapping the back label with their NFC smartphone.
According to Sylvia Kaiser-Kershaw, NXP Global Segment Marketing RFID-NFC Smart Consumer Products: “Selinko offers an innovative and comprehensive solution, well-known in the wines and spirits market. By combining the expertise and innovation of our two companies, we can work together to raise awareness and increase take-up of digital authentication technologies in the wine industry, in order to improve the level of protection compared to existing technologies and to reconnect winegrowers to their customers, in a world that is increasingly becoming connected, mobile and shared”.
“As a passionate winemaker, I feel it is essential to be able to continuously guarantee to my consumers and my customers a level of expertise and quality worthy of a genuine Geantet-Pansiot wine,” said Fabien Geantet. “I was very quickly convinced by the strength of the Selinko platform’s multi-service approach, which meets all of my needs with a single technology.”
“We’re delighted with this collaboration, which represents a real opportunity for vintners to be able to enter a new digital era and gain easier access to an NFC authentication technology with encryption – a type of solution that was previously only used for great vintages,” said Patrick Eischen, CEO Selinko.
The sale of bottles outside their established markets can now be countered thanks to Selinko’s solution. This solution, which engages the distribution network and the end consumer at the same time using one and the same technology, does not require any particular investment (apart from an NFC-enabled smartphone), or any specific technical expertise.
It enables each bottle to be uniformly traced as far as the end customer. Each bottle is initially assigned to a distributor, importer or final customer and to a geographic area dependent thereon. Deviations can be detected and flagged up to the vintner via an online platform (Brand Manager).
Armed with a simple expert app available on an NFC smartphone, those involved in the Geantet-Pansiot distribution chain will be invited to identify themselves and scan the bottles to ensure proper delivery to their final destination. They will also benefit from useful information about the wines and the estate.
The end consumer, by scanning the bottle, will be the final link in this chain of traceability. Unlike the technologies often used in this area, using a unique tag for each bottle with an encryption system offers a far more reliable alternative in which the risk of duplication is greatly reduced, and does not require any particular expertise on the part of the consumer or the distributor when it comes to identifying a visual marking as being original or fake.
The connected Geantet-Pansiot bottles will be on sale at the beginning of next year.
