Every year, the food industry writes off losses it had the data to prevent. Products expire in warehouses that no one is watching closely enough. Pallets move through supply chains with identification so inconsistent that by the time a problem surfaces, the damage is already done. Aliya Pogorelskaya, founder and CEO of Portugal-based Altinteg Technology Solutions, has spent the better part of her career staring at that gap and building something practical to close it.
Altinteg delivers Traceability as a Service: a complete, end-to-end system that connects physical products with reliable, real-time data. The company works primarily with food producers, retailers, and regulated-sector businesses across Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Africa, and Australia. Its pitch is direct: know what you have, where it is, and what condition it is in, at every point in the supply chain. The financial case is stronger than most operators expect.
The Visibility Gap Has a Price Tag
The numbers behind supply chain invisibility are striking. Food waste costs the global retail supply chain an estimated USD 540 billion annually — roughly one-third of total revenues across post-farm operations through point-of-sale. For a business managing perishable inventory without reliable product identification, a significant portion of that figure is avoidable.
The core problem is deceptively simple. A product can be present in a system and simultaneously absent from reliable data. Stock counts diverge from physical reality. Inventory that should have been moved, marked down, or redirected sits quietly deteriorating until it becomes a write-off. Without accurate, item-level visibility across operations, those losses accumulate faster than most finance teams realize, and they seem invisible at first.
Pogorelskaya describes the operational reality plainly: “Traceability is no longer only a compliance topic — it is becoming a commercial, operational, and strategic advantage.” When businesses can track products with consistent identification from origin to shelf, they can act before losses occur rather than report them after the fact.
Research bears this out. A study analyzing data from more than 1,200 sites across 700 companies in 17 countries found that for every USD 1 invested in reducing food loss and waste, companies recovered USD 14 in operating costs. The gap between investing in visibility and ignoring it is not marginal — it compounds across every decision made without good data.
From Compliance Checkbox to Commercial Infrastructure
For a long time, traceability was treated as something companies did when regulations required it. That framing has begun to change. The US FDA’s Food Traceability Rule under FSMA Section 204 carries a compliance deadline of July 20, 2028 — but some of the world’s largest retailers have already moved ahead of it, rolling out their own traceability requirements and passing the pressure upstream to their suppliers. Chipotle completed a nationwide RFID rollout across its restaurant and supplier network, replacing manual barcode scanning with real-time inventory visibility at scale.
What makes that example relevant for the wider food sector is what it reveals about the ROI model. The business case for RFID-based traceability at Chipotle was built around operational outcomes — faster receiving, more accurate inventory, less manual labor — rather than regulatory necessity. The compliance benefit was real, but it was secondary to the commercial one.
Altinteg’s service model is built around the same logic. The company does not sell RFID hardware in isolation or deliver a one-time installation. It provides the full system: RFID, smart labeling, data capture infrastructure, software connectivity, maintenance, and ongoing support, calibrated to each client’s operational reality. For mid-market food operators who lack the internal resources to assemble and manage those components independently, that distinction matters. It converts a capital investment with uncertain integration outcomes into a managed service with clear deliverables.
“At the heart of Altinteg is a practical ambition: to help make complex systems more accessible, so that better visibility, better decisions, and less waste become The Order of Things™,” Pogorelskaya said. That ambition is commercially specific. Documented RFID deployments show inventory accuracy rising from roughly 65% with manual processes to 99% with automated identification, and the downstream effects on stock handling, waste prevention, and labor productivity are measurable and direct.
Product Intelligence: The Next Layer of Value
Knowing where a product is located solves only part of the problem. For perishable categories, the more commercially urgent question is the product’s condition and whether that condition is about to change in ways the supply chain cannot yet see.
A container of fresh produce can be present in every system and simultaneously compromised by temperature exposure that occurred hours or days earlier. A packaged product can appear available while its shelf life has already crossed the threshold that determines whether a retailer will accept it. Without condition data at the item level, these situations surface as unexpected losses rather than managed decisions.
Altinteg is developing FreshInteg to address exactly this layer of supply chain intelligence. The product direction targets freshness sensing and affordable smart tags designed for mass production volumes in fast-moving consumer goods categories. The goal is to make real-time condition data commercially viable at the individual item level — moving traceability from a system that records movement to one that reflects reality.
Global food waste from the supply chain is projected to cost USD 3.4 trillion cumulatively between 2025 and 2030. A substantial portion of that waste occurs in perishable categories where the product deteriorates before it is identified as at risk. Freshness intelligence at the item level, delivered at a price point viable for FMCG production, would allow businesses to make real decisions: reroute, redistribute, promote, or act before a product crosses from value to write-off. That is not a compliance outcome. That is a financial one.
Altinteg has aligned its technology foundations with RAIN Alliance and GS1, two globally recognized standards bodies for RFID and digital product identification, and has built credibility through its association with the European RFID Labs and Universities. RAIN Alliance reported 42.7 billion RFID tag chip shipments in 2025, with food and perishables explicitly named among the four key growth verticals. The infrastructure for item-level product intelligence is being built on a global scale. The companies that position themselves within it early will determine how financial returns are distributed.
For Altinteg, that positioning is deliberate. The company operates as a systems builder — assembling the best-available components, including Avery Dennison tags used across its own deployments, into practical, working traceability systems for clients who need real operational results. Product visibility, done properly, is worth paying for. The data has been making that argument for years. The industry is finally starting to listen.
