It's very simple to just print the same QR on the cheese by just taking a picture of it. The barrier to counterfeit the cheese is considerably higher if the measure is harder to copy.
To be fair, this is for retailers, not consumers.
And ideally you can enter the serial-number on a website and know when it was produced and sold, this should be enough for you to know if its yours or not (or e.g. it was resold)
An account is not needed to verify a QR code. Just take a look at what Brazil has done with QR codes. It’s everywhere and, in many places, it does exactly this, to verify the authenticity of a document, for example. I have e-signed documents and what goes on the paper is actually a QR code.
It’s not difficult to imagine this being used to fight counterfeit goods.
Make QR a link. Consumer access the website and sees aproximate information about previous scanners with some of items identified as warehouses and shops.
That's the route of cheese for you, and for them. Not ideal but can help you avoid doubles.
Until forgers' cheese sells first and you have false-negatives (:
I find it hilarious that cheese wheels get defended more than money bills rather than having authorized resellers or something alike. I feel it's more like DRM in a sense that making these chips is a business too, and someone found a customer in these scared cheesemakers.
You can encode the first order or link to a tracking website. Depending on the depths of the supply chain this means the wholesellers name needs to match with the factory, production and sale date. If there is 20 steps in between this would get difficult, but such a supply chain should not be trusted in the first place.
So it would do the same as the tracker chip. And since there is no encryption mentioned, the signal of the tracking chip could be as easily copied as the QR code.