In Rizhao, one of the world's three major coastal green tea cities, a complete tea industry chain traceability and anti-counterfeiting system is helping the eastern China locality ensure superb quality of local green tea.
From tea buds picking to tea brewing, every link of the green tea industry chain there is traceable.
"Spring tea is coming", exclaimed a tea farmer in Jufeng Town of Lanshan District in Rizhao, busy checking as carefully as usual the clusters of tender green tea buds piled in his bamboo basket recently.
Such scenes merely represent a common sight in local tea farms. As a core green tea-producing area in northern China, Rizhao has integrated traceability and anti-counterfeiting into tea plantation, fresh leaves purchase, tea processing, logistics, and sales to ensure quality reliability.
For instance, in a bustling processing workshop near the tea farms in Jufeng Town, electronic traceability scales stand ready for fresh leaf weighing and other devices enable orderly quality testing, coding and related recording.
A traceability management platform has also been established in the city, allowing automatic backstage pooling of tea weight and production zone-related information via electronic traceability scales and grower information when tea farmers use special QR codes and cards for tea trading.
While local tea producers are testing products quality, real-time results of such testing are synchronously uploaded to the afore-mentioned online traceability management platform for precise quality control.
For green tea products, they will be labeled with special traceability and anti-counterfeiting marks, which offer an easy access for consumers to query the entire process of tea planting, processing and testing.
This year, Rizhao plans to shape four model localities for green tea traceability to spur more replicable and applicable benchmarks for the city's green tea industry, according to Li Yirun, a member of Rizhao government's green tea work panel.
Three four-pronged mechanisms are scheduled to be adopted to further enhance green tea traceability and anti-counterfeiting among local tea traders, tea farmers, processing businesses, and tea market construction contributors, added Li.
Under such circumstances, Rizhao, whose green tea gains fame at home and abroad for the refreshing aroma, mellow taste, thick leaves and multiple infusions, is poised to embrace a vibrant rural vitalization and green development booster.
(Edited by Duan Jing with Xinhua Silk Road, duanjing@xinhua.org)
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