It’s hard to disagree that the “2017 Award for the Most Popular Buzzwords in Business Meetings” goes to (in that order):

#1 Digitalisation (or digital transformation)*

#2 Blockchain

#3 Artificial Intelligence

#4 Internet of Things

#5 Pizza? Pizza!!!

I know, no one really likes this word, right?

What this shows is that we all agree that these technologies are entirely changing how we learn, trade, shop, or work. If we consider one of my favourite activities — eating — the way we produce, sell, ship, or trace the food we consume is still so “20th century” (as in: analog and manual). The one-billion-dollar question is then how come technologies like IoT didn’t already revolutionise the entire food industry? Or better: how do we make it happen?

Let me first share three major reasons why I think this didn’t happen yet based on what I’ve been observing in the IoT market in the last 15 years.

1. Massive Complexity of Large-Scale Solutions

One of the largest hurdles in any IoT projects is the sheer variety of existing technologies out there, from hardware platforms, to software solutions, and especially to protocols (literally thousands…). This hodgepodge of incompatible technologies means that any real-world IoT solution that spans several independent actors (which is common in supply chain scenarios) is is a nightmare to build and operate (as in very expensive and time-consuming). To reach the level of flexibility required by the supply chains of tomorrow, it’s seriously time we upgrade the “glue” that interconnects the variety of people, sensors, packages, business processes, and software applications.

2. Costs and Risks

Another reason why IoT didn’t revolutionise the supply chain world yet remains the total costs of those projects. Not just hardware costs (sensors, installation, etc.), but also for the connectivity and cloud (storage, processing, front-end, etc.). On top of this, the software side is particularly tricky, as virtually every company runs on top of highly customised (and therefore rigid!) solutions painfully assembled over the years. Any changes to such system will likely be very delicate and expensive, as it bears the risk of breaking something that works. Few senior executives have accepted to take such a big gamble without a solid & proven alternative in place…

3. Limited ROI & Success Stories

Until now, the majority of IoT solutions on the market feel like “nice to haves”. Nice ideas and fun stories to tell, but few digital supply chain impact on actual business P&L sheet at the end of the year. Few success stories of why it’s worth investing to digitalise the supply chain. Of course, I have zero doubts the potential is very real and massive, but so far only those projects do a good job of justifying the costs, making them less of a priority for businesses (“hey, we’ve done things this way for 20 years and it’s still working, so why change it now?”).

One of the more important first-world problems: interoperability (credit: Pinterest —can’t find the original source, let me know if you do!!)

The harsh reality of the food industry and their supply chains is the starting point of our work at Ambrosus. We know too well that building a solution that is technically much better/faster/cheaper than what’s out there is necessary, but it just won’t be enough to reach our goal. The only way we can succeed is to work very closely with our clients and plug ourselves into how their supply chain works. That’s what will enable us to build a solution that integrates seamlessly with today’s IT systems and infrastructures and can augment it with less impact, risk, and costs.

It will be obviously much harder than I make it sound, but I’m very confident that Ambrosus has raised enough to have a serious go at this challenge. More importantly, we’re receiving far more requests that we can handle from small and large food companies.

In my role of Chief Product Officer at Ambrosus, my mission will be to shape our portfolio of solutions and ensure our engineering teams are building the best solutions for our clients (and before you ask, yes — we’re hiring!!). Today, we’re only at the beginning of our journey and the hard work lies ahead, but I wanted to share some of the things that our teams are working on right now. It’s certainly not a detailed roadmap with timings and crunchy tech details (it would take a few posts like this one to share it all), but rather a high-level snapshot of the key focus areas for the next few months.

#1 — Binding the Different Business Processes Together

Many blockchain projects started from the technology layer and then try go up the stack to find where they can add value in a given context or industry — the classic “solution looking for a problem” scenario. In contrast, the ecosystem we are creating is deeply rooted in the reality & limitations of today’s supply chains industry — and our objective is to solve real-world challenges through realistic, practical, and accessible solutions.

So our highest priority right now is to strengthen and release publicly our foundation layer — which is a set of protocols and software implementations that form the backbone of our ecosystem. Think of it as the software glue that standardises and integrates data from a variety of heterogeneous sources (sensors, devices, infrastructure, and also more traditional enterprise applications). Specifically, this core building block is what allows us to digitally define assets, documents, contracts, conditions, payments, or events using a universal language, store and retrieve those information across multiple storage systems (cloud, blockchain, IPFS, and others). Expect solid progress in this area over the next few months!

#2 — A Digital Birth Certificates for Every Physical Asset

Every product a client buys in a shop (a little pack of Parmesan, a nice bottle of Clos St Denis from Domaine Ponsot 1945, a nice Kobe Beef steak) — just like every asset in a supply chain (a pallet, a box, a shipment, a refrigerated truck, etc.) — has a unique story to tell. A fundamental piece of our puzzle is how to tell the unique story of every physical asset in a digital way. Especially, how can we securely share parts of this story between different stakeholders while enforcing strong data integrity and protection policies. This essentially comes down to creating a unique and uniform, yet decentralised and secure digital identity for every asset within the blockchain where we can keep track of the birth of every product and also every relevant events that happened in its life.

Every asset in a supply chain — batch, lot, product, pallet, truck, etc. — has a unique story. Ambrosus allows this story to be told digitally in a trusted and transparent manner. Credit: Missouri office of the Secretary of State.

#3 — TagLab and Sensors R&D

As we ramp up our R&D lab, we’ll rapidly grow our embedded systems team to design efficient and scalable ways to collect and send high-quality sensor data securely to our services and blockchain. In particular, we’ll put together a portfolio of different sensing and tagging technologies (we’re talking crypto NFC/UHF tags and printed electronics) as well as a partner program to help us deliver and scale custom sensing solutions adapted to the specific needs of each client. Strengthening our ability to fast prototype sensing + hardware + connectivity + packaging for various use cases and clients while maximising data integration with our solution will be a strong USP for us.

Printed sensors and electronics make it easier and cheaper to track the quality of authenticity of food along its entire supply chain (Photo credit: Thinfilm)

#4 — Full compliance with GS1 Standards

GS1 is the main organisation that has invented the language of business for the last four decades (they’re basically the W3C & ICANN combined of barcodes/B2B/logistics/shipping/traceability), and they’re clearly at the forefront of standardising traceability of items across the entire supply chain. At Ambrosus, we’ll rapidly ensure that our core protocol and solution is fully aligned and interoperable with those standards, and provide advanced tooling to use our blockchain to store and process GS1-compliant traceability data.

GS1 is developing the main industry standards around food traceability. Ambrosus will leverage them to keep track of the detailed life story of food items on the blockchain.

#5 — Strong Focus on Developer Tooling

Finally, the value of the Ambrosus ecosystem is ultimately bound on how many developers and businesses will write applications on top of our core layer and blockchain. To lower the barriers to adopt our solution, we’ll devote a decent portion of our efforts to establish a stellar developer experience in the months to come (Hackathons! APIs! Docs! Demos! Tokenised incentives!) One of the key projects we hope to release soon is a front-end responsive application that non-tech consumers (ie. the big majority of them) can use to easily retrieve and view the story of products they buy, and guarantee their authenticity, quality, and provenance as measured by various sensors and devices. A demo is the works, and the source code will soon follow!

Feedback welcome!

We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below! Do you have suggestions about what you’d like to see on our roadmap? Do you have ideas about how we can collaborate? Please get in touch — we’re looking forward to hearing from you!