Autentico Srl, a technology firm based at Via Cagliari 215 in Capoterra, a coastal town just south of Cagliari in Sardinia, sells an anti-counterfeiting system called Autentico NFC that hides a near field communication tag inside the adhesive label a producer already uses. Its strapline translates from the Italian as “Stop uncontrolled distribution. Stop counterfeiting. Start with Autentico NFC”, and that pairing is the interesting part. The shopper taps the bottle and gets an answer about authenticity. The producer, at the same moment, gets a pin on a map showing where in the world that bottle actually turned up.
NFC is the short-range, 13.56 MHz HF flavour of RFID that every modern smartphone can read without any extra hardware, which is what makes it the default choice for consumer-facing product authentication. The company says it builds both the hardware and the software, using radio frequency alone to certify that a product is unique, and that the approach scales from a few hundred pieces a year to millions. Everything below is drawn from Autentico’s own product page as of September 2026, and the company publishes no independent test results, so treat the claims as vendor statements rather than verified performance.
The label is made smart before it reaches the bottling line
The most practical idea in the system is also the least glamorous one. Rather than asking a producer to redesign packaging or bolt a tag applicator onto an existing line, Autentico asks the customer to post in their existing reels of adhesive labels. The company runs them through what it calls an Insert Label Machine, which places a tag into each label, and sends the reels back. The labels then go through the same labelling head they always did. The company says the customer does not have to change their production process at all, and that it can handle any type of paper adhesive label reel.
Autentico calls the result an “etichetta parlante”, a talking label, built around what it names a DNA Tag: the idea being that the product speaks for itself rather than relying on a certificate in a drawer somewhere. For a small winery or a single-estate oil producer, avoiding a capital purchase and a line change is often the difference between doing a traceability project and shelving one.
Wine, oil, shoes and the awkward case of metal
The applications the company lists map onto the sectors where Italian provenance carries the biggest price premium. On wine bottles the tag sits inside the adhesive label, protected from handling and from the wet, cold conditions of a chiller but still readable through the paper. On olive oil the argument is about substantiating a specific claim: organic certification, or a particular pressing method, tied to the individual bottle rather than to a batch code. On shoes, Autentico says artisanal production can be protected and the process automated to the point of recording photographs of the manufacturing steps, so the buyer can see the shoes being made.
Metal boxes get their own entry, and the company is right to flag it as a special case. Metal detunes an HF antenna and can kill a read outright, so tagging metal products means selecting a tag built with a ferrite layer or an on-metal construction rather than reaching for a standard inlay. Autentico says tagging metal requires care both in choosing the correct tag and in managing the stored data.
The named customers indicate the end of the market being targeted. Cantina Santadi is a co-operative winery founded in 1960 in the Sulcis region of south west Sardinia, with around 200 member growers farming over 650 hectares, and is widely regarded as the benchmark producer of Carignano del Sulcis. Dal Forno Romano is a Valpolicella estate at Cellore d’Illasi in Veneto, making wine under that name since 1983 and treated by collectors as a reference point for Amarone. Also listed are Colle Massari, where Autentico says it applies and reads HF NFC tags on wooden crates including non-standard sizes, the citrus grower Arance Campanella, the pasta producer Amandafood, Sterylab, and unnamed high-end electronics manufacturers.
Reading the map, not just the tag
The geolocation piece is what separates this from a simple authenticity check. Autentico says that when a tag is read, the platform records the product’s position in real time, and that producers can view georeferenced reads through a web back end where they also manage product cards and distributors. That turns an anti-counterfeiting tool into a distribution-control tool: if bottles allocated to one national distributor keep being tapped in a different country, the brand owner has evidence of parallel trade rather than a suspicion. For premium drinks and footwear brands, grey market leakage is frequently a larger and more constant financial problem than outright forgery.
What an NFC tag can and cannot prove
It is worth being precise about what consumer tap-to-verify demonstrates, because the marketing around it is often looser than the engineering. A tag that simply returns a static serial number can be read by anyone with a phone and written to a blank tag, so a plain UID proves very little on its own. Robust schemes use cryptographic authentication in the chip, the best known approach being the secure unique NFC message, where the tag computes a fresh message authentication code on every tap using a key that never leaves the silicon, so a URL replayed from a cloned tag fails verification at the server.
Autentico’s page does not name a chip, a standard or an authentication method, so there is no way to tell from it which of these approaches is in use, and readers evaluating the system should ask. One clue cuts both ways: the company says Autentico NFC can identify an original product with no internet connection. Offline verification is genuinely useful in a cellar or a warehouse with poor signal, but it means the check is being made inside the app rather than against a server, which is a meaningfully different security model and one that needs care in how keys and revocation are handled.
Why this is being sold in Italy first
The commercial backdrop is severe. Coldiretti, Italy’s largest farming association, put the damage from counterfeit and imitation Italian food at around 42 billion euros in figures reported in June 2026, of which roughly 40 billion relates to Italian-sounding food produced in the United States and about 2 billion to outright counterfeits of Italian products. Olive oil and wine are perennial targets precisely because origin is the product.
Regulation is heading the same way. Under the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, the 2025 to 2030 working plan gives 2027 as the indicative year for adopting the ecodesign measure covering textiles, apparel and footwear, with Digital Product Passport obligations following roughly 18 months after a delegated act enters into force. Producers already carrying a unique, item-level digital identity on each product will start that work from a better position than those who are not. Autentico also sells a companion product it calls Autentico CHAIN for distribution using RFID, along with HF and UHF tunnels, handheld and tablet readers and UHF gates. More on tagging at the pack and item level is collected in the smart packaging and NFC sections.
Read more at https://prodottoautentico.it/anticontraffazione-vino-moda-olio-nfc/
