Fujitsu, Phytocontrol collaborate to offer contaminant analysis service for food safety
Fujitsu has initiated a strategic collaboration with Phytocontrol Group, French leader in contaminant analysis for environmental and food safety. In August, the two companies signed a memorandum of understanding, and as part of this cooperation Fujitsu and Phytocontrol will develop chromatography analysis services supported by artificial intelligence.
These services aim to contribute to ensuring food safety by speeding up and improving the accuracy of contaminant analysis in the food industry and to contribute to the digital transformation (DX) of various analytical business processes by expanding services based on this analysis technology to other industries including healthcare and cosmetics on a global level.
Together, Fujitsu and Phytocontrol will offer end to end AI chromatography analysis technology via “Fujitsu Computing as a Service” (CaaS) – Fujitsu’s service portfolio that makes advanced computing technologies available to users via the cloud – to provide chromatography analysis services to food companies, distributors, and regulators across the world. Fujitsu and Phytocontrol aim to start provision of the new service during fiscal 2023.
This collaboration with Phytocontrol is an element in Fujitsu’s ongoing commitment to providing optimal IT environments and solutions that meet the diverse needs of customers under Fujitsu Uvance, its global business brand to realize a sustainable world.
Toshiaki Ariyama, SVP, Head of Uvance Core Technology Unit, Fujitsu Limited, commented: “Through this strategic collaboration, we look forward to providing a wide range of cloud services via CaaS based on Phytocontrol and Fujitsu’s accumulated technologies and know-how. Together, we aim to deliver a service that ensures the safety of food and water, supports people’s lives, and contributes to the realization of a sustainable society.”
Global food crisis:
growing need for food security
The ever-worsening global food crisis remains an ongoing issue, as approximately 400,000 people worldwide die each year from the consumption of contaminated food.
To this end, food safety and ensuring that contaminants and pollutants do not enter the food production and supply chain represents an important task. However, the fast and accurate analysis of contaminants in food gained in importance in recent years due to increasing numbers of a variety of contaminants in food and the need to analyze a growing number of different food samples.
To address this issue, Fujitsu and Phytocontrol in 2020 developed a system integrating Fujitsu’s AI technology that automates the process of contaminants analyses in food and water. The AI system is not only able to accelerate analysis time from the extraction of raw data per sample to the verification of results by a factor of five, but can also reduce human errors, improving operational efficiency and accuracy significantly. Based on these efforts, Fujitsu and Phytocontrol started further cooperation to offer their AI based analysis system as a service via Fujitsu’s CaaS to provide advanced and easy-to-use technology to a wide range of players in the food industry.
Based in Nemes, France the purpose of Phytocontrol is to guarantee the safety of food and the environment by providing technical solutions and complete support for laboratory analyses, regulatory monitoring and training, quality audits and digital traceability.
Collaboration
Global provision of CaaS component analysis services for food contamination Fujitsu’s CaaS encompasses advanced computing resources like Fujitsu’s quantum inspired Digital Annealer technology, the computing technology of supercomputer Fugaku, and software applications that allow a wide range of users to solve problems with AI and machine learning via the cloud. Fujitsu CaaS will be available to the Japanese market in October 2022 and expanded to the global market during fiscal 2023.
As part of their collaboration, Fujitsu and Phytocontrol will build a food contaminant component analysis service that they aim to provide to a wide variety of stakeholders, including food companies, distributors, and regulatory authorities via Fujitsu’s CaaS. The two companies aim to support fast and accurate analysis of contaminant components in the food industry and to contribute to ensuring food safety.
Mikael Bresson, Founder and CEO of Phytocontrol Group commented: “We are successfully working with Fujitsu for more than 2 years now to digitalize our production processes. We believe that the ‘Fujitsu Computing as a Service’ is a very good opportunity to speed-up and scale-up our collaboration to grow our business with fast and reliable chromatography analysis using artificial intelligence around the world.”
