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Artificial Intelligence applied to the agricultural production of processing tomatoes and a commitment to compliance with the Sustainable Development Diligence Directive will be the watchwords of the 2024 season for Princes Industrie Alimentari.
At the customary meeting held at its Foggia plant, Princes Industrie Alimentari, Southern Italy's leading tomato processor, launched the operations of the 2024 tomato processing campaign by presenting its action guidelines and processing forecasts for the season. This year's main innovations include the implementation of artificial intelligence-based solutions and an internal adaptation process, ahead of the market, to the so-called Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive recently approved by the European Union.
Princes Industrie Alimentari presented a new "Agriculture 4.0" tool based on artificial intelligence and implemented in collaboration with Hort@, a spin-off from Milan's Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, to encourage the technological transfer of innovations developed by academia to the agricultural sector. The system will assist agronomists by enabling them to collect information in real time during the ripening phases of tomatoes in the field, and thanks to predictive action, it will be able to alert agronomists to possible critical problems. This will enable timely action and responsible agricultural choices to reduce environmental impact. The system will support the control of water and fertilizers, and should reduce their use by around 30%.
Confirming the commitments made over ten years ago with the arrival of the Princes Group in Italy and after more than EUR 60 million of investments, the company will begin a mapping of all activities, the supply chain and existing collaborations with all partners in order to comply fully with the principles of the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive recently approved at European level.
Although the Directive aims to involve large companies first and foremost, Princes Industrie Alimentari believes it is essential to act as a pioneer to ensure that all companies, whatever their size, work quickly to improve their environmental impact and protect human rights, particularly companies linked to the agro-industrial sector, which is still too often marred by cases of illegal employment. To this end, Princes Industrie Alimentari will be working with Oxfam Italia on a detailed analysis.
Forecast of 200,000 tonnes of processed tomatoes
In terms of "red gold" processing forecasts, given the current scope of its activities, the company expects to process around 200,000 tonnes of "Made in Apulia" tomatoes between July and September, and to hire 1,000 new seasonal employees at its Foggia plant for this purpose.
"Princes Industrie Alimentari has always worked to bring responsible, forward-looking innovation to the southern tomato-growing region. Today, at a time of fundamental importance for the company's growth and the success of 'made in Apulia' products, we want to speed things up even further by introducing Artificial Intelligence on the farms to support our experts, analyze our actions to comply with the highest standards at European level in terms of social responsibility and, consequently, support the worldwide growth of traced and certified Made in Italy tomatoes," commented Gianmarco Laviola, CEO of Princes Industrie Alimentari.
Collaboration with Oxfam Italia has also expanded, with the third edition of the survey on working conditions on farms in conjunction with Princes Industrie Alimentari. The survey was carried out during the 2023 season, and the results, analyzed by Oxfam, confirm the positive impact of the policies applied, full regularity with regard to the contractual situation, and worker satisfaction in terms of remuneration, contractual conditions and treatment.
The meeting, which marks the start of the season, was attended by some forty tomato cooperatives and growers' organizations, as well as representatives of Coldiretti, Oxfam Italia and the trade unions. Professor Maurizio Prosperi, from the University of Foggia Department of Agronomic Sciences, Food, Natural Resources and Engineering, also spoke, focusing on the scientific parameters for determining the "ethical" price of tomatoes, as did Giovanni Giuntoli, Hort@'s agronomic experimenter, who demonstrated the potential of the new technological platform.
Some complementary data
For more information on Hort@,
Download the Hort@ brochure
here.For more information on pomodoro.net,
click here.Sources: corriereortofrutticolo.it, commission.europa.eu, horta-srl.it
