For individual producers and manufacturers, and for Australia as a whole, the identity of food—its provenance, production methods and manufacturing processes—are becoming almost as important to the market as the food itself.

Australia and New Zealand, two exporting nations that trade on their “clean, green” image, have been targeted by traders using fake “country of origin” labelling to sell foreign produce at a premium.

But if criminals can fiddle with labelling, they can’t tamper with the isotopic and trace elements of the food itself, which expresses where it was grown and how.

Dr Anita Andrew, who has worked on the development of the technology, said these atomic-level signatures can reveal much about where food came from.

Information includes its latitude and altitude, temperature and humidity, local agricultural practices, local industries, geology, the age and composition of the region’s underlying bedrock, the continent from which the region first originated millions of years ago and—in the case of animal products—the isotopic composition of foods that the animal has ingested.

Work by Dr Andrew and colleagues has demonstrated that the process is sensitive enough to pinpoint which district Australian milk came from.

“We can tell whether the milk was produced by cows close to the ocean, in irrigation areas, or in areas where there is abundant natural water," Dr Andrew said.

"We can also tell what type of pasture the cows were fed on.”

A recent study by researchers Tamara Pilgrim and John Watling of the University of Western Australia, and Kliti Grice of Curtin University, looked at the isotopic signatures of tea, a product for which provenance is extremely important.

The analysis found that teas could not only be identified by region—Assam, Darjeeling, Nilgiri—with virtually 100 per cent accuracy, but that, for instance, within the Nilgiri region teas could be traced to their individual plantations with 94.7 per cent accuracy.