OriginTrail Story: From Food Traceability to the Blockchain

Our story started with food traceability projects. But the OriginTrail Decentralized Network will benefit any product supply chain.

Blockchain is a kind of technology that challenges previous thinking and the way business is done. The tokenization of business models calls for a new approach and is bound to disrupt whole industries. At the same time, blockchain and tokenization will only work if we can apply them to solve real-world, genuine business problems and to address broader public issues.

Food safety is often at the heart of consumers’ concern, especially in the view of recent large-scale food safety scandals. And it’s not just the food — most of the products we use every day come to us via long and complex supply chains which can adversely affect the quality of the product delivered to consumers. The quality of the product is closely related to the reputation of the brands — problems in the supply chain can cause enormous damage.

If anything goes wrong, brand damage can be enormous. In the era of connected society and viral spreading of the news via social media, one simple mistake or uncovered wrongdoing can sink the brand image — and also the company value. A fault can even be buried deep down the supply chain and unknown to the company in the forefront. It is much easier to lose the consumers’ trust than to gain it.

Fashion, Medicine, Elecrtronics … OriginTrail is now applicable to any product supply chain

The development of OriginTrail began with food traceability projects we implemented for our partners in recent years, which helped them with communicating the origin of products for their premium food brands. Supply chains involved in projects spanned across international markets, and both technology as well as marketing teams have been heavily involved in the development of these projects. You can read more about cases of GMO-free dairy, premium poultry brand, and locally grown vegetables in case studies posted on our website. That gave us unique experience so now we can apply this same solution to any product supply chain.

Moreover, we started thinking how to further improve trust. When we were looking for the best solution for assuring data integrity and accountability, blockchain was quickly identified as the best fit. After running initial tests, we have implemented it in the cases of selected customers. Next step was to start irreversibly storing fingerprints of data we receive on the Ethereum blockchain and with that assure that files we receive have not been tampered with. Now it is time to take yet another step — we are ready to share our lessons with the community and make it universally accessible. OriginTrail Decentralized Network can be used for any product supply chain and it will be based on widely adopted GS1 standards.

Gathering data from the entire supply chain will open the door for a whole new generation of business applications. Unified information, based on a graph database, will enable developers to build a wide set of business applications, from supply chain optimization, alert systems for early detection of mistakes, telling the origin of the product to a consumer, gathering data for audits and certifications, and much more.

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