In 2007 our company undertook the inception phase of an International Food Chain Integrity and Traceability Project jointly funded by the Australian and US governments.
Participants included 36 entities made up of; Government agencies, Key industry players and industry bodies for beef and dairy supply chains. This included but not limited to;
Over a 12 month period we identified the key critical control points for a beef and dairy product, for 13 international standards including but not limited to; Food Safety, Quality, Traceability and the US Bioterrorism ACT 2002.
We analysed over 36 nodes in the beef-to-burgers and dairy-to-sports bar supply chains and identified over 700 critical points who's data needed to be incorporated into a blockchain.
For assisting with supply chain analysis for the project we developed a .net web tool based on scientific approaches for analysing supply chains to identify the critical data points that need to be shared on a distributed ledger for a supply chain outcome we termed 'Supply Chain Assurance'. This tool has been used to manage food safety risk in Heinz baby food factories, Simplot vegetable manufacturing, and risk management from catchment to tap and back in the water sector.
We have recently launched an App called Eziops for capturing the critical data on hand-held devices in use across 1200 sites in most major cities and towns in Australia and are starting a trial in the US. We also interface with RFID temperature monitoring devices to a dashboard.
At the time we started the inception phase of the international traceability project in 2006 we were not aware of blockchain technology but postulated that the supply chains needed a public/private, secure, and distributed ledger.
As the CTO I have been keeping a close eye on Stellar and built myself a coin.
We are now ready for phase two which is a pilot demonstration of a product through a retail grocery supply chain with critical data linked to the blockchain.
The end game for consumers in supply chains using this approach is to build a purchase filter on their wallet so that they can specify certain standards that must be met before a transaction can be approved. eg product must be slavery free, be carbon neutral, temperature compliant and so on.
Is Stellar the right choice for our blockchain needs?
If so we are interested in partnering with providers to;
- Make our supply chain assurance assessment tool aka Blockchainifier open source and;
- Interface with existing solutions on the network
- Build out any gaps
- Conduct a supply chain visibility project with some of our existing grocery retailer clients both in Australia and the USA.
- Build the supply chain quality management system into a wallet that allows consumers to specify their needs.
