We live in a world full of data. An increasing amount of data is collected each day from the environment around us. In food supply chains, data is collected at multiple points and it can provide in-depth insight into production, answering questions like “What were the production conditions?” and “What were the temperature, humidity, and sunlight levels?”

Data gives the farmers — who are at the beginning of supply chains — the opportunity to stand out, highlight their good practices — like organic farming, for example — and get fairly compensated for their efforts. However, giving farmers the ability to monetize the value of their data and showcase the quality of their work has been challenging in the past.

With that in mind, we created Food Data Market (FDM), a decentralized marketplace that incentivizes data sharing with the goal of contributing to sustainable supply chains.

Inclusive data marketplaces are the core element of sustainable supply chains. They bring a fair distribution of gains along supply chains and give citizens and organizations ownership over their data.

Food Data Market is an open-source software infrastructure, utilizing the OriginTrail protocol for trusted data exchange. This infrastructure can be applied to data exchange in any industry, not just in food supply chains.

More About Food Data Market

Food Data Market is a comprehensive marketplace supporting new economic models for the future of sustainable food supply chains. It encompasses trust, neutrality, and inclusiveness, which are the core elements of distributed ledger technologies. At the same time, it aligns the incentives of participants along the supply chain. This is enabled by a privacy-by-design approach that allows farmers and cooperatives to win back control over their data, give it a fair price, and sell it to supply chain partners that recognize its value.

A human-centric user experience is an important part of ensuring the wide usage of the solution. Food Data Market allows data sellers to provide datasets to data buyers through a user-friendly interface for direct and disintermediated compensation underpinned by an open-source, decentralized infrastructure.

The user interface is an important part of FDM

In a pilot project for the LEDGER program, Perutnina Ptuj, a leading poultry manufacturer in Southeastern Europe, installed Kakaxi IoT devices to gather sensor information and images from one of their farms. By purchasing this data, retailers that sell Perutnina’s products under their private labels can reassure their consumers that they support the highest animal welfare standards in their supply chain.

Image from a Kakaxi device at one of the farms

See how to purchase a dataset on FDM:

Food Data Market is Part of the LEDGER Program

Trace Labs, the core development company of the OriginTrail protocol, has already been recognized for its solutions for trusted data exchange between organizations with the Food Safety Innovation Spark Award from Walmart’s Food Safety Collaboration Center in 2017 and the Food+City Challenge Prize. Partners in the OriginTrail ecosystem include Oracle, BSI, and GS1.

The LEDGER program supports research and innovation projects that focus on privacy-by-design, reliability, trustworthiness, and openness as core values. The program started in 2019. From almost 300 applicants, only 16 were selected for funding and so Trace Labs became one of the top 5% teams. We successfully managed all of the stages of the program.

LEDGER is an initiative of the Next Generation Internet (NGI), which is funded by the European Commission with the purpose of creating the future internet as an interoperable platform ecosystem. The focus had to be on openness, inclusivity, transparency, privacy, cooperation, and the protection of data. Besides NGI, other LEDGER partners are Blumorpho, Dyne, Ethereum Foundation, and IOTA Foundation.

Potential Beyond Food Supply Chains

This infrastructure is freely available on the resources below, and Trace Labs is using it to build applications for various industries.