Malavasi Watermelons Carry QR Codes for Traceability

Italian company Malvasi Agostino & Figli, which is based in Poggio Rusco in Mantova, Italy, is known for the varieties of watermelons that it produces and trades. The most popular of its produce are the Cuoredolce baby watermelons. These minimellons are small in size, weighs from 1 to 3 kilos, easy to box and carry, low in calories, and have brilliant red flesh and nice bright and dark green-striped skin. These fruits have gone through several strict ripeness and quality controls, making sure they are excellently sweet and refreshingly cool.

Now, the watermelon producer is following in the footsteps of others in the fruit industry – like the Ontario Tender Fruit Producers, First Fruits, and TopFruits.com – in using quick response codes.

If you recall, we have previously reported that Ontario’s tender fruit producers can get QR codes from the marketing board to attach to the packaging of fruit products like peaches, plums, nectarines, seedless grapes, pears and cherries. These codes take customers to relevant information about the fruits from the Ontario Tender Fruit Producers Marketing Board’s website.

As for First Fruits, quick response codes are used for its “Know Your Grower” campaign. The codes are placed on bags, merchandise bins, and other materials in supermarkets, and when scanned, will take consumers to a video or mobile website that allows them to have an inside look at the orchard farmers and growers.

We also wrote about TopFruits.com before, thanks to its iPhone 4 mock-up. Using its fruit products like grapes, cantaloupes, limes, kiwis, raspberries, aubergines, and watermelons, the company created a giant iPhone 4 replica. The European distributor also used QR codes to spread various videos it has made.

Cuoredolce watermelons are now labeled with these two-dimensional matrix barcodes, which, when scanned by consumers using smartphones that are equipped with a QR code reader app, will take them to the company’s blog — “Follow the Quality” – that displays the traceability of the fruits.