Intro
A hot, sun-drenched summer day. You cast an absent-minded glance at the little bottle of Peroncino (the small-size Peroni) on the beach-bar table, when a QR code bearing a word that has become magic, traceability, catches your eye. You scan it and a page opens about “the journey of 100% Italian malt”. There’s talk of blockchain. And you realize you haven’t exactly made a great discovery. Since 2021, the neck label of many Peroni bottles has carried a QR code, and the malt supply chain has been tracked on the blockchain.
But let’s take it one step at a time.
The players: three different roles
Behind that page there isn’t just the blockchain: there’s a business process that interfaces with outside companies.
- Peroni (farmers, the Saplo malting plant, breweries) collects the supply-chain facts: sowing, harvest, deliveries, production batch. This is data that already sits in the company’s systems.
- pOsti is a small Italian agrifood-tech company. Its trade isn’t blockchain. It’s making a supply chain readable: management software and a batch code mean nothing to someone standing at the bar. pOsti takes that data and builds on top of it the website that opens from the QR code — text, videos, the page. It had already done the same in 2020 with the corn in Nastro Azzurro.
- Ernst & Young, the international consulting firm, provides OpsChain: a cloud service. Peroni doesn’t have to set up a node, and it doesn’t write the software on the network itself. The internal systems send the data to EY; EY, on Peroni’s behalf, writes to the public blockchain (Ethereum at first; later there was also talk of Polygon). The one keeping that service up and running is EY, not the shift supervisor.
In a nutshell: Peroni declares, EY records, pOsti tells the story.
What’s on-chain and what’s off-chain, only in company systems
Traceability data lives on three levels of systems: public on the blockchain, also viewable (only if you really feel like it, since it’s technical and anything but intuitive) through Etherscan, the Ethereum blockchain explorer; public through Peroni’s website; and confidential in the company’s systems.
- On-chain (the public ledger, the one you can also open with Etherscan)
The batch certificate is a token with a number, the date and time it was created or closed, who signed the entry, and any changes of hands. In a project like this, a few batch fields can also be attached to the token — for example production or certification dates — if the service has put them in the metadata or in the event. That is visible to anyone, with no account on the company’s systems. It can’t be deleted and it can’t be rewritten: it’s a final snapshot of what was declared at that moment. In practice,
- Off-chain, but public (the website that opens from the QR code)
This is where the storytelling lives: text, videos, a map, the pOsti page. It takes the batch data and dresses it up nicely. The tone, the photos, the order of the sentences can all be changed. It’s not the ledger. It’s the shop window.
- Only in company systems (ERP, warehouse, malting plant, brewery)
This is where the real bulk is: field-by-field deliveries, weights, recipes, volumes, lot blends, commercial data. Part of this treasure trove, they said, stays encrypted precisely because it’s sensitive. The consumer doesn’t see it. The chain doesn’t see it. It’s there to produce the batch, not to tell its story.
The QR code shows you the shop window. The Etherscan link shows you the snapshot. The plant’s logbook stays inside the company.
The chain doesn’t tell the whole supply-chain story. It fixes, in a way that can’t be altered, that that batch was certified like this, at that instant.
But why blockchain? Weren’t the good old systems enough?
Yes, to show a QR code and a page about malt they were more than enough. Peroni’s management system already knows what a batch looks like. A website hooked up to that data would have done the job. So why drag a public network into it?
Because a company database is governed internally (“whoever has the passwords”). You can correct a field, delete a row, republish the page. Nobody outside notices. The chain doesn’t make the data any truer to begin with — it still comes from Peroni’s computers — but it makes the snapshot put on-chain impossible to quietly erase. That date, that batch number, that entry stay put. If tomorrow the website tells a different story, Etherscan still holds the first one.
For Peroni the advantage isn’t “brewing better beer”. It’s a padlock and a calling card. It can tell consumers and partners: this claim about Italian malt isn’t just a marketing slide; there’s a public anchor that the company can’t make disappear on its own. It serves trust, audits, and a sustainability story backed by something verifiable. It costs more than a QR code on top of an ERP. In return, it doesn’t have to ask the world to trust only its word about the ledger.
For whoever pops the cap the routine doesn’t change: scan, story, maybe a click on Etherscan. The advantage isn’t watching the farmer on his tractor in real time. It’s being able to check, if you want, that that batch was certified at a given instant and that that piece of the claim is set in stone. Those who don’t click the link just get a fancier story. Those who do get a minimal proof, independent of the website.
In a nutshell: traditional systems keep the facts. The blockchain keeps the snapshot of what the company chose to certify — and doesn’t let anyone quietly retouch it.
