Food is a key component of our every day life. Over the last year I’ve been studying end to end food systems, from consumer touch-points to supply chains. I went so deep I helped start a company that aims to define a new category with high-end grab and go meals.

One of the major questions consumers ask in the food space is what is the origin of products, are products trustworthy and most importantly are they safe for consumption. On a personal level I mainly want to know if what I’m buying and eating is of the quality I’m paying for.

While exploring the space I met the OriginTrail team, that has been solving origin tracking on the ground, with deployed solutions, for over 5 years. Their successful case studies include origin tracking of dairy, produce, meat and wine.

Solving a real problem, using the best technology available

The OriginTrail team has started addressing the food origin trail problem with a basic technology approach, prioritizing solving business challenges first to get tangible results for their customers.

The development of OriginTrail’s food traceability projects involved supply chains that spanned across international markets involving engineering and marketing teams.

They mastered the domain first and built more and more of the supporting technology later. When looking for the best technical solution for assuring data integrity and accountability they identified properties of the blockchain matched their requirements and provided a clear advantage compared to standard stores of record. As the next step OriginTrail started irreversibly storing fingerprints of data on the Ethereum blockchain, assuring that data received has not been tampered with.

The learnings gathered put the OriginTrail team in a unique position to build a platofm that allows them and others to build similar solutions for any product supply chain, based on GS1 standards.

Supply chains and decentralization

Supply chains today are increasingly growing in complexity. This creates challenges in managing the ever increasing number of relations effectively. At the very core of any business relation lies trust. Involved parties all operate with different levels of information and accountability. This leads to suboptimal decisions and inefficencies in the market.

A symptom of such asymmetry in supply chains is very limited visibility and transparency throughout the entire chain. In most cases entities have merely insight in to a step back (suppliers) and a step forwards (buyers).

I see decentralization in combination with a mechanism to align incentives as a very powerful mean to address the above and unlock much more. Judging by the traction the team is getting on the market with Walmart and the likes, I’m not the only one.