Chinese juice maker signs up for product integrity platform

A subsidiary of Chinese fruit juice specialist SkyPeople has joined a technology alliance that will help it monitor and fight counterfeiting.

The Aigo Integrity Alliance is described as an 'online to offline' (O2O) platform that allows consumers to check whether a product is genuine, whilst also giving brand owners the opportunity to interact with them and award loyalty points. Its developer says it also helps Chinese companies "to work together to compete fairly with oversea brands."

The system meets an often-cited objective of making end-user authentication of products secondary to other customer engagement tools, rather than requiring them to be motivated to verify products routinely.

There are around six million people in China who have signed up to the Aigo platform – earning so-called 'Patriot points' for purchases – and its developer is expecting to have "hundreds of millions of members" within the next three years.

The platform went online in 2014 and currently incorporates some 10,000 Chinese products from participating companies which – according to Aigo - have to be well-qualified based on "product quality and merchant integrity".