JAPAN – Fujitsu, a leading Japanese global information and communication technology company, has kicked off a strategic collaboration with Phytocontrol Group, a French leader in contaminant analysis for environmental and food safety, to develop AI-supported chromatography analysis services.

These services aim to contribute to the assurance of food safety by accelerating and improving the accuracy of contaminant analysis in the food industry.

They also aim to contribute to the global digital transformation (DX) of various analytical business processes by expanding services based on this analysis technology to other industries such as healthcare and cosmetics.

Together, Fujitsu and Phytocontrol will provide chromatography analysis services to food companies, distributors, and regulators around the world through “Fujitsu Computing as a Service” (CaaS), a service portfolio from Fujitsu that makes advanced computing technologies available to users via the cloud.

“Through this strategic collaboration, we look forward to providing a wide range of cloud services via “CaaS” based on Phytocontrol and Fujitsu’s accumulated technologies and know-how.

“Together, we aim to deliver a service that ensures the safety of food and water, supports people’s lives, and contributes to the realization of a sustainable society,” said Toshiaki Ariyama, SVP, Head of Uvance Core Technology Unit, Fujitsu.

Fujitsu and Phytocontrol plan to begin offering the new service come 2023.

This partnership with Phytocontrol is a part of Fujitsu’s continued dedication to offering excellent IT environments and solutions that satisfy the many customer needs under the umbrella of Fujitsu Uvance, its international business brand, in order to create a sustainable world.

The ever-worsening global food crisis remains an ongoing issue, as approximately 400,000 people worldwide die each year from the consumption of contaminated food.

To this end, food safety and ensuring that contaminants and pollutants do not enter the food production and supply chain are crucial.

However, the necessity to quickly and accurately assess food contaminants has grown in relevance in recent years as a result of an increase in the number of various food contaminants and the requirement to examine a rising number of diverse food samples.

In 2020, Fujitsu and Phytocontrol combined their technologies to automate the process of pollutant analyses in food and water.

The AI system can considerably improve operational efficiency and accuracy by reducing human errors, in addition to being able to expedite analysis time from the extraction of raw data per sample to the verification of results by a factor of 5.

Based on these initiatives, Fujitsu and Phytocontrol began a more extensive partnership to offer their AI-based analysis system as a service via Fujitsu’s CaaS to give a variety of companies in the food industry cutting-edge and user-friendly technologies.

“We are successfully working with Fujitsu for more than 2 years now to digitalize our production processes.

“We believe that the “Fujitsu Computing as a Service” (CaaS) is a very good opportunity to speed up and scale up our collaboration to grow our business with fast and reliable chromatography analysis using artificial intelligence around the world,” said Mikaël Bresson, Founder and CEO of Phytocontrol Group.

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