Attested
Building affordable, open, verifiable food traceability for small producers and conscious consumers. An open-source oriented hardware-and-software ecosystem that connects field to fork through transparent data, fair value distribution, and digitally responsible design.
Attested is a traceability platform that brings transparency, accountability, and autonomy to food supply chains. Designed for small cooperatives and conscious consumers, it provides a practical, privacy-respecting way to document and share every step of a product’s journey – from field to fork – using verifiable data that is rarely available at this level of detail for such players.
At its core lies a modular hardware–software stack that combines handheld RFID and QR scanners, environmental sensors, and a Fiware-based data infrastructure. Producers use it to record cultivation, processing, and transport events, while consumers can simply scan a QR label on the product to access an interactive web page showing where, when, and under what conditions it was made. The architecture allows data to be stored locally or on cooperative-owned servers, giving small producers full control over their information and freedom from the dependency and costs of proprietary traceability platforms.
By uniting open hardware, transparent data flows, and human-centred design, Attested turns traceability into a shared language of trust. It enables cooperatives like Sicily’s Valdibella to communicate authenticity, sustainability, and provenance through verifiable digital storytelling – strengthening consumer confidence while advancing a fairer, more digitally responsible food economy.
Designed for interoperability and community contribution, its transparent architecture invites reuse, adaptation, and audit – offering a replicable model for accessible, inclusive, and digitally responsible traceability across Europe’s evolving food ecosystem.
WHY THIS MATTERS
Food transparency remains deeply uneven. Large manufacturers increasingly deploy digital traceability systems to meet regulatory demands, while small cooperatives and family-run producers – those often most committed to sustainable and ethical farming – often lack the means to join this digital transformation. Many still rely on paper-based logs, ad-hoc spreadsheets, or labels that cannot be linked back to verified data. As a result, their efforts toward quality and sustainability risk remaining invisible to consumers, who in turn face a sea of generic claims about “local” “sustainable” or “responsible” food with little evidence behind them.
This gap between trust and proof leaves both sides underserved. Producers lose visibility and fair recognition for their practices while consumers struggle to find reliable information about what they eat. At the same time, emerging EU regulations on digital product passports and deforestation-free supply chains are accelerating the need for accessible, verifiable transparency. Without affordable, privacy-preserving, and ethically designed solutions, small producers may soon face a different kind of exclusion – compelled to adopt closed or data-extractive platforms simply to comply with new traceability rules, losing control over their own data and agency in the process.
WHAT THE SOLUTION DOES
Attested turns this challenge into a practical, human-centred solution – showing how open, affordable digital tools can make food traceability both ethical and accessible.
Imagine a cooperative of organic farmers in western Sicily at the height of harvest. Instead of relying on paper records or scattered spreadsheets, they use a small handheld scanner to log each batch of tomatoes or pomegranates as it leaves the field. The device automatically captures the time, location, and transport details, linking every entry to a unique digital identifier. Nearby weather stations record soil humidity, temperature, and rainfall, connecting local environmental conditions to each harvest. Together, these data points create a transparent digital footprint for every product – accurate, lightweight, and owned entirely by the cooperative.
When the produce reaches the processing site, staff scan it again to record when and how it was handled and packed. Each jar or bottle receives its own QR code, which connects to a secure database hosted on cooperative-controlled servers. No data is handed over to external platforms, ensuring that transparency begins at the source and remains under producer control. The system’s open architecture allows cooperatives to decide exactly what they want to share publicly while keeping sensitive operational data private.
At the retail or consumer end, the same data becomes a story. Scanning the QR label on a jar of Valdibella tomato sauce opens an interactive webpage that maps the product’s journey – from the field’s coordinates to the date of harvest, processing, and transport. Simple visual elements show weather patterns and storage conditions, while short texts introduce the people behind the product. What was once a static label becomes a transparent narrative, bridging physical provenance with ethical intent.
For Valdibella, this proved more than a communication tool. During the pilot, the cooperative used the system’s environmental readings to plan irrigation and anticipate yield variations. Retailers in Palermo used the digital pages to complement in-store communication, ensuring that every customer could access the story behind each product. And consumers across Palermo and Antwerp reported greater trust once they could see real evidence of where their food came from.
Attested’s modular technology stack – combining handheld RFID/QR devices, IoT sensors, and a Fiware-based backend – translates supply-chain complexity into something both transparent and human. It offers small producers a way to meet emerging regulatory requirements on their own terms, without surrendering control or ethics for compliance.
HOW YOU CAN USE IT
The Attested system is more than a pilot – it presents a practical foundation for digital responsibility in food-chain traceability. Its hardware and software components have been designed with open-source principles and can be deployed or adapted by different actors across the food system, each engaging with the tools in distinct yet connected ways:
For producers and cooperatives:
The Valdibella Cooperative in Sicily, which piloted the system, demonstrated how these insights might also support more efficient irrigation and long-term agricultural planning. Data remains locally stored or hosted on cooperative-owned servers, giving producers full control over their information while ensuring compliance with privacy and data fairness principles.
For distributors and retailers:
Smaller community-based retailers, such as Spaccio Ciauli in Palermo, valued the system as a way to share authentic product stories directly with customers. By linking each product’s QR code to a dynamic digital page, retailers can show where and how it was produced, reinforcing credibility without increasing staff workload. Larger retailers saw the potential for integrating Attested’s open data feeds into their existing systems to meet upcoming EU requirements for traceability and transparency.
For consumers:
Scanning a QR code on a product brings produce traceability to life. Each page offers a clear timeline and map of the journey made from cultivation and processing to distribution, alongside stories and images of the cooperative and its members. Consumers can understand not just what they are buying, but who made it and under what environmental conditions. All data is drawn directly from the cooperative’s verified records, ensuring authenticity while protecting individual privacy.
For developers and open innovation partners:
For researchers and policy makers:
Attested provides a concrete example of how digital responsibility can coexist with regulatory compliance – and how small actors can actively help shape a fairer food data ecosystem. For policymakers, the project highlights for example that traceability need not be limited to food safety and border control: it can also be a vehicle for ethical data use, transparency, and consumer trust. While upcoming regulations such as the EU Digital Product Passport (DPP) are primarily designed for compliance and logistics, Attested demonstrates how similar frameworks could also strengthen civic and ethical dimensions – empowering producers to own their data and consumers to access and understand it.
For researchers, Attested’s architecture and cooperative-based data governance model creates new opportunities to access aggregated, anonymised datasets for farming and sustainability research. Rather than being locked inside proprietary platforms, environmental and production data can be shared responsibly, advancing evidence-based studies on soil health, crop performance, and climate adaptation. This approach mirrors the EU’s broader vision for an open, fair, and interoperable digital food system – one where the benefits of data circulate back to those who create it.
DIGITAL RESPONSIBILITY IN PRACTICE
From the beginning, Attested was designed as a tangible example of how the Digital Responsibility Goals (DRGs) can be applied to real food-data systems. Each goal was translated into concrete design and development choices, ensuring that digital innovation strengthened – rather than compromised – fairness, privacy, and human agency.
From the project’s outset, farmers, cooperative staff, and retailers took part in workshops and usability sessions that introduced the digital tools – handheld RFID/QR scanners, IoT sensors, and cooperative dashboards – and allowed participants to test and refine them in real contexts. Training extended beyond usage to comprehension: producers learned how data move through the Fiware-based architecture, how privacy and security settings operate, and how to interpret environmental metrics captured by field sensors. Short awareness sessions also introduced basic cybersecurity and data-protection practices, enabling non-technical users to recognise risks and report issues through the system’s ticketing tool.
For consumers, clarity of design supports literacy by default. The QR-based interface uses plain language and simple visuals to explain where and how data are collected, helping people understand traceability without needing technical expertise.
By demystifying the technology for every participant in the value chain, Attested turns digital literacy into a shared competency – ensuring that transparency and responsibility are meaningful in practice, not just in principle.
Attested applies a defence-in-depth approach tailored for small, distributed food cooperatives. Its backend is fully modular and compartmentalised: each service runs in an isolated virtual machine, communicating only through authenticated, encrypted channels. This micro-segmentation follows principles from the ISO/IEC 27000 standards framework – a high level of security planning for small-scale, open-source systems.
All firmware and code are intended for public audit under open licences (publication pending), allowing independent verification of security practices – a governance innovation that transforms users into co-stewards of cyber-resilience. The platform includes a lightweight intrusion-detection and ticketing system so that even non-technical users can report anomalies directly to developers, supported by basic cybersecurity training and awareness sessions for cooperative members and farmers. This combination builds a participatory security culture in which every stakeholder contributes to system integrity. Combined with strict data-minimisation, and encryption, these measures make Attested’s architecture both robust, transparent, and participatory.
Attested operationalises privacy-by-design at both software and infrastructure levels. The system collects only the data strictly required to link a product’s unique identifier to its verified origin. On the consumer side, the web interface stores no personal information – only an anonymous product ID, IP hash, and browser user-agent for aggregated analytics. The producer dashboard runs as a separate, authenticated service where user accounts contain no personal fields by default; even optional identifiers (name or email) were excluded during the pilot.
Privacy is further reinforced through a microservice-based architecture built around the Fiware Orion Context Broker. This design enables strict data segregation and minimisation: For example, IoT and handheld devices send only relevant event data to the broker, while a controlled Orion-to-SQL adapter filters what is written to long-term storage. Transient readings – such as geolocation or sensor data – can expire automatically, reducing unnecessary retention and limiting exposure. The architecture therefore embeds minimisation, separation, and auditability directly into the data flow, rather than relying solely on external policy.
Each component communicates through encrypted channels, and producers may host the full stack on cooperative-owned servers, enabling data sovereignty. Every instance includes plain-language privacy notices generated from the project’s GDPR template, outlining what data is collected, for what purpose, and how users can exercise their rights. External data sharing is limited to aggregated, anonymised exports for scientific analysis, preserving research value without exposing individuals or businesses.
By embedding these safeguards directly into its architecture and workflow, Attested demonstrates a model of privacy that is both technically rigorous and practically achievable for small producers. It shows developers how open infrastructures can respect user rights while remaining fully functional, auditable, and interoperable within modern traceability ecosystems.
Attested approaches data fairness as both a governance principle and a technical design pattern. Each cooperative or producer that generates data retains ownership and control over it – not through policy declarations, but by architecture. Production, sensor, and logistics data are stored either locally or on cooperative-owned EU servers, with no replication to external cloud services. Access controls in the Fiware backend ensure that only authorised entities can write to or query each dataset.
The consortium has stated its intention to release all software and hardware under AGPLv3 and Creative Commons licences (repositories pending publication), preventing any single actor from locking in or privatising shared innovation. The open repository model allows other cooperatives to fork and adapt the system without dependency on commercial intermediaries. Aggregated datasets – such as environmental indicators or transport metrics – are governed through a redistributed IPR model, giving collective credit and control to the cooperatives contributing data.
This approach prevents extractive data practices that often occur when small producers must rely on proprietary traceability platforms. Instead, Attested’s architecture embeds fairness at multiple levels:
- Technically, by enabling local storage and role-based access.
- Legally, through open-source licensing.
- Organisationally, through shared ownership of aggregated outputs.
Together, these mechanisms turn data fairness from an abstract ethical goal into an operational reality – one that allows transparency, innovation, and equity to coexist in a shared digital ecosystem.
Attested practices transparency across the full technology stack. Full-stack openness-covering the hardware designs, device-level software, backend microservices, and user-facing dashboards-is built into the project’s DNA. All components are intended for release under AGPLv3 or Creative Commons licences, making Attested one of the few traceability pilots to publish both its hardware and core software stack openly for inspection and reuse.
Data transparency follows the FAIR principles: aggregated datasets are designed to be findable, accessible,interoperable, and reusable, with version histories and provenance metadata attached to each repository and API endpoint. This allows developers and researchers to trace data lineage and integrate Attested outputs into other responsible-data systems.
For users, transparency becomes tangible through design. The consumer interface presents the full product journey –harvest, processing, and transport –on a clear timeline and map, with verifiable timestamps and environmental indicators. Producers and retailers see the same verified records through cooperative dashboards, ensuring that transparency is shared, not one-sided.
By uniting full-stack openness, FAIR data, and human-centred storytelling, Attested makes transparency both auditable and understandable, a living example of how open technology can strengthen trust throughout the food system.
Attested treats technology as a tool for empowerment, not substitution. From the first design phase, farmers, cooperative staff, retailers, and consumers helped define how the system should represent them — what data would be visible, what would remain private, and how digital interfaces could mirror real-world relationships of trust.
Rather than automating human judgement, Attested keeps people in control. Producers actively decide what information to record and disclose, reviewing the data through their dashboards before publication with a human-in-the-loop workflow that ensures that technology amplifies local expertise instead of replacing it.
The project also adopted inclusive-design principles: multilingual interfaces, accessibility for people with visual or cognitive differences, and representation of diverse stakeholder groups. Cooperatives choose how their collective identity is displayed in the consumer interface – reinforcing agency over both data and digital presence.
For developers, Attested demonstrates how human agency can be built into system architecture and governance alike: participatory requirements gathering, opt-in data sharing, and transparent representation policies. By embedding these mechanisms directly into code and process, Attested demonstrates that responsible digitalisation can strengthen autonomy and diversity within the food system rather than standardising it away.
CONTRIBUTION TO THE TOOLBOX
The Attested project contributes both technical components and methodological resources to the DRG4FOOD Toolbox. Public outputs and full open-source repositories to be confirmed with the project team.
- Open-Source Hardware Toolkit for Field and Supply-Chain Monitoring
A set of low-cost devices for environmental and logistics sensing, hand-held RFID/QR scanners and IoT sensor nodes measuring soil moisture, air temperature, humidity, and light conditions. Developed by CommonsLab, the hardware builds on prototypes validated in the Gen4Olive and BetterFactory H2020 projects and adapted for the Attested pilot with the Valdibella Cooperative in Sicily.
Designs are released as Open-Source Hardware (OSHW) with accompanying firmware, schematics, and bills of materials under Creative Commons and GPL-compatible licences.
IMPACT AND OUTLOOK
Attested demonstrates that cooperative-led digital responsibility can be both technically feasible and socially meaningful. Working with the Valdibella Cooperative in Sicily, the project showed how affordable, sensor-based traceability can make sustainability practices more visible while safeguarding privacy and autonomy. By combining handheld RFID/QR tools, Fiware-based data services, and local hosting options, Attested helped to translate potentially complex food-chain data into transparent, human-readable stories – connecting small producers, retailers, and consumers in a shared trust framework.
For participating producers, the system also showed promise to help improve planning and transparency, with environmental readings supporting irrigation decisions and yield forecasting, and cooperative dashboards offering real-time insights into quality and timing across the harvest cycle. Retailers used the QR-based storytelling pages to communicate authenticity and origin, and consumers reported greater confidence in what they were buying.
Attested’s open-source hardware and software resources provide a reusable foundation for others seeking to implement privacy-respecting traceability within short food supply chains. Together, the published hardware schematics, firmware, and Fiware configuration will demonstrate how small cooperatives can meet traceability and compliance requirements through community-owned, interoperable technology.
Looking ahead, the Attested approach offers a replicable model for transparent and ethical data sharing across Europe’s food ecosystem – advancing the DRG4FOOD vision of trustworthy, inclusive, and digitally responsible food systems.
QUICK FACTS
- Funding
- DRG4FOOD Open Call #1
- Use case
- Targeted Nutrition
- Partners
- Start date
- May 2024
- End date
- Apr 2025
- Resources