What's in your food and where does it come from?

Ludwigshafen, Germany - When it comes to food, consumers now want to know exactly what they are buying and what ends up on their plate, while feed and food manufacturers must meet increasingly high standards in terms of safety, quality, traceability, and environmentally benign manufacture of individual products and ingredients.

To meet these requirements, BASF has developed the SET (Sustainability, Eco-Efficiency and Traceability) method to make all these aspects of food production transparent. SET is based on the TÜV-certified eco-efficiency analysis of the entire life cycle of a product or manufacturing process, including aspects such as environmental pollution and CO2 emissions by the products themselves and their precursor products.

"Our SET initiative allows feed and food manufacturers to trace exactly which ingredients were used and which conditions applied in the manufacture of a product," says Dr. Christoph Günther, the man in charge of the initiative in the BASF Nutrition Ingredients unit. "In S.E.T., we apply this principle to our food ingredients and feed additives, making sustainability tangible," explains Günther. "The data generated in eco-efficiency analysis of our products are available to our customers from the feed and food industry as required."

According to BASF, SET will enable customers to see at any time whether and to what extent the starting materials used in products are sustainable. The data is made accessible to all customers anywhere in the world via GTNet (Global Traceability Network) - a global platform used in the food industry for targeted sharing of product information material.