TE-FOOD (TFD) ICO Analysis: A Blockchain-based Food Tracking and Monitoring Ecosystem

##Executive Summary

Project Description

Over the past few years, food safety has been a growing concern in the world. It is estimated that around 700 million people around the world are hospitalized every year — with over 400,000 deaths — due to foodborne diseases. Additionally, the use of animal antibiotics have been abused over time, leading to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant infections; this costs the American healthcare system alone $20 billion every year. Furthermore, the world food industry can no longer avoid tackling the issues that plague it. Issues like economic inequality, food fraud, and questionable supply chains must be resolved sooner rather than later.

The TE-FOOD project aims to solve the problems outlined above by providing a blockchain-based food-traceability ecosystem. They plan to track and store all information (logistics, feeding, vaccination etc.) related to livestock and food products on a blockchain ledger maintained by TE-FOOD. The prospective participants in this ecosystem include supply chain companies, consumers, and food monitoring authorities; TE-FOOD plans to provide all parties with access to pertinent information — on livestock and food products — in a transparent manner. As a result, large-scale food recalls and supply chain irregularities will likely be avoided, and the costs of supply chain companies, reduced.

According to the team, in order to fulfill the specific needs of each food category, their ecosystem will provide customized solutions. They plan to have optional veterinary checkpoints at every step, along with in-built fraud management functions for all category-related processes. The TE-FOOD project claim that they already keep records for 6,000 companies, tracking 12,000 pigs, 200,000 chickens, and 2.5 million eggs per day. They plan to start tracking cattle, seafood, fruits, and vegetables in 2018.

TE-FOOD’s token, TFD, is ERC20 compliant and it is supposed to represent the identity and information data of tracked items. Transaction fees in the ecosystem are to be paid in TFD. Furthermore, consumers that use the TE-FOOD mobile app to read TE-FOOD’s QR-codes on retail food items will be able to see each item’s history and at the same time, earn tokens. This should encourage consumer-conscious behavior, thereby improving the rate at which people validate a food item’s quality before consumption. Lastly, consumers in the TE-FOOD ecosystem will be able to order for food analysis services and pay in TFD.

Hard Cap and Valuation

There will be a total of 1 billion TFD tokens and the TE-FOOD project aims to raise $19.1 million for 51% of the token total. The 49% left is to be shared thus: 44% goes into a general reserve and 5%, into a marketing pool. The 44% that is reserved will be locked for 2 years; 25% of it will supposedly be released after the first year and the remaining 75% should be released after the second year.

Unsold tokens will allegedly be put into the general reserve and sold on the TFD market or during a future token sale until the public token pool reaches 500 million tokens.

TE-FOOD held a pre-sale and sold 16,900 ETH (~$14 m) worth of TFD tokens (with up to 36% bonus).

Price Per Token

For the public sale, the price of 1 TFD token was set at $0.05, and for the first 8–12 hours of sale, there was an individual cap of 1 ETH.

Important Dates

TE-FOOD had a bounty campaign from Jan. 22nd, 2018 to February 22nd 2018, and 2% of the total number of tokens in circulation were distributed among token holders during the campaign.

The project held its public sale on the 22nd of February, 2018, and they reached their hard cap of $19.1 million on the same day, signalling the end of the sale.

Update From Token Sale

As mentioned above, TE-FOOD held their public sale on the 22nd of February, 2018, and according to the reports gotten from their communities, the sale went smoothly. The decision to limit individual caps to 1 ETH at the start of the sale along with their thorough whitelisting process helped them forestall gas wars. They reached their hard cap less than 2 hours after the public sale started.

There was a minor distribution problem and as a result, TE-FOOD had to redistribute their token, now renamed TFD, to all their investors. The whole process was done by the team, and all the investors had to do was wait for ~24 hours.

Marketing Power

As at the time this post was published, TE-FOOD had over 40,000 followers on Facebook, over 13,300 members on Telegram, 7,200+ followers on Twitter, and over 2,000 followers on Medium.

Team Members’ Areas of Expertise

Business experts

Erik Arokszallasi, CEO

• CEO of two corporate IT development companies in Hungary: Erba Ltd. and Flexsys Ltd.

Endre Jobbagy, Blockchain and Business Advisor

• Founder & CEO of Interticket, a software company, for 29 years.
• Co-Founder of Blockchain Competence Center.

Gabor Nagymajtenyi, BDO leader, Blockchain Team

• Founder and owner of several corporate IT development companies in Hungary, including inform and PPT Consulting.

Target market experts

Katalin Vereczkey, Food Industry Expert

• Several managerial positions at Syngenta, an agriculture company that aims to improve global food security, for 18 years.

Dr. Michael Patching, Independent Animal Welfare and Husbandry Advisor

• Michael is the current Vietnam Livestock Services Manager for Meat and Livestock Australia, a red meat industry body that aims to improve animal health and welfare; he has held this position for almost 3 years.

Marketing experts

Dr. Trung Dao Ha, CEO

• According to the T-Food website, he has 20 years of marketing and sales experience in Asia and Europe.

Marton Ven, CMO

• Marketing leader of Erba Ltd. and Flexsys Ltd.
• According to the T-Food website, Ven has 21 years of marketing, sales and project management experience.

Legal experts

No team member with legal expertise.

Software engineering experts

Istvan Szukacs, DevOps, Blockchain Team

• System/Software Engineer at several firms, including Amazon, IBM and France Telecom.
• CTO of StreamBright, a company that focuses on the adoption of big data technologies and the creation of data driven applications, for over 2 years (ongoing).

Attila Szabo, Lead Developer, Blockchain Team

• Over 12 years of software engineering experience.

Tamas Biro, Mobile App Developer

• Web Developer and Mobile App Developer at Erba Ltd. for over 10 years.

Miklos Csaszar, Senior Software Engineer

• Senior Software Engineer at Erba Ltd. for 12 years.

Gergely Mate, Software Developer

• Software Developer at several companies, including Erba Ltd., MTA SZTAKI and Emarsys.

Cooperation with Zalo.me

• Zalo.me is a free mobile application with over 70 million users.
• To view the food’s history, Te-Food’s QR-codes can be read by the Zalo App.

Blockchain development experts

Abraham Andre (Silur), Chief Architect, Blockchain Team

• One of the authors of cSploit.
• Member of Ethereum Foundation’s eWASM and research team.

Token sale structure experts

No team member with token sale structure expertise.

Token economics experts

No team member with token economics expertise.

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Disclaimers:

• Nothing written in this article is a legal or an investment advice.
• Information is provided on a best-effort basis and is subject to change without prior notice. Be sure to verify everything you read with a project team.

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The analysis was produced by Research Center team members: Alexander Hinz, Mark Jedd, Eugene Tartakovsky.

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