Yorkshire company Agroisolab, GTTN member since more than three years now, is apparently one of the world’s leading companies when it comes to tracking, assessing and labeling the origin of an enormous range of products – from timber to caviar. A recent article by the Yorkshire Post shed more light on the topic.
The company started verification processes after food-and-mouth disease shocked authorities all over Europe. It set off a new set of standards and procedures to track origin and processing of livestock. From steak, complicated products like minced meat, over eggs and caviar to burger patties, Agroisolab includes everything in its database. The lab relies on isotope ratio analysis to test everything they collect in a tedious and rolled out process of collecting samples all over the world.
Already leaders in determining food origin, the scientists at Agroisolab are now turning their head towards verifying timber origins and manufactures, an even bigger and possibly more complex field for certification if you ask Roger Young, Agroisolab UK’s CEO.
“A lettuce goes from a field to the supermarket shelf within a day. But a piece of wood might have been felled five years ago, sent from a mill to a merchant to an exporter, then to, say, Vietnam to be made into furniture. By the time you buy it in the UK, it’s traveled a chronological and physical distance that makes it completely anonymous”, says Young.
The lab is currently in their third year of collaborating with Kew Gardens, a global resources for plant and fungal knowledge in the UK, to further extend the databases of physical wood samples.
Be sure to check out Agroisolab’s information on timber verification for regular updates on the databases and the projects they are working on.
