Connected champagne putting a cork in bogus bubbly

Champagne is now connected: Thanks to tracking technology, champagne houses now have tools to better guard against fraud while gaining a new channel to interact with their customers.

Using a combination of unique QR codes and radio-frequency identification (RFID) emitters integrated into the label or the bottleneck foil, each bottle of bubbly can now be tracked to help battle counterfeiting of the luxury product.

"In 2016, we didn't print any connected labels. In 2019 we'll be at one million! The market has doubled each year," said Arnold Deregnaucourt, head of Billet, a company which has specialised in printing labels for champagne bottles for more than a century.

While a number of firms like Adents, Antares Vision and Tesa Scribos offer food and beverage makers a way to track their goods, Billet hopes that its long history working with the champagne industry will give it an advantage in adapting the technology to its practices.

Laurent Berns, founder of TraceAWine, a technology startup that has acquired Billet, said QR codes are sufficient for smaller champagne houses, but for those with production lines that handle more than 12,000 bottles per hour the RFID emitters are added...