Interviewer: Hi Stefan, now I know that this was an invite-only exclusive type of event that you attended. Are there any major takeaways that you can give us about how it went?

Stefan: Yes, so it was an informal event really as there were only about 30 people or so. This made it nice and comfortable to talk to all of the attendees and really get an idea of where they are coming from.

For my part, I gave a presentation in a scenario planning session about the future of automated food ordering, through which participants could actively develop an understanding of why blockchain and IoT are both relevant for this world. It was really more of a discussion than anything else, as there was a lot of good participation.

Interviewer: And concerning other topics that were addressed during the three days you were there?

Stefan: Well we discussed a lot about local food. Local food, in a way is the new organic food. People want to have food that is grown as close as possible to them. But of course you have to be sure that this is actually the case. In this sense the origin of products becomes really important, and that is exactly something that Ambrosus can do really easily.

Interviewer: Concerning the participants that were there can you say what kind of people you met?

Stefan: It was a really good networking opportunity, to go really in depth with certain companies that may find the Ambrosus solution quite useful for what they are doing. Some people were executives or shareholders of large organic food producers, so the discussions were fruitful.

In terms of the range of participants there, we had a lot of good discussions with a whole variety of people: companies focused on setting new standards for agriculture, companies interested in finding more sustainable ways of producing food and showing that the consumer, and then finally other startups in the blockchain space that are doing different things than Ambrosus, but that still can be helpful, and where collaboration is possible. All of the talks we had were really nice informal conversations where it was really more about the vision and values people had.

Interviewer: Any major takeaways from the various conversations?

Stefan: Well, I was amazed by the fact that everyone, including farmers, was aware of the importance of data. In fact, one sentence that was said many times was: data is king — so you will need reliable sensors to gather this data, as well as a reliable way of storing and managing this data. Of course the best option for this type of data storage is through a distributed ledger — i.e. a blockchain. The overall reasoning was that only in this way can brands be transparent in a way that the consumer knows the data has not been tampered with.

Interviewer: Thanks Stefan.

Stefan: My pleasure.