Overview
Traceability & SCM for Agriculture
The agricultural supply chain is convoluted, complex, and lacks any form of traceability, creating a significant consumer trust deficit and inefficiencies for all stakeholders.
The opacity of the food industry has driven a trust deficit between consumers and food providers, farmers, and federal regulators. It is near impossible to trace the movements of our food and to confirm its ingredients.
A 2018 USDA study of accredited organic certifiers found that almost half did not meet at least one standard. This is a frequently occurring situation, whereby food is not what it says it is, with a 2017 USDA report admitting a failure to adequately certify imported organic food.
Industry Categories
Related Topics
agriculture | agriculture industry | AgTech | asset tracking | digitization | food provenance | food traceability | STRATO Use Case | supply chain
Key STRATO Features
Context & Challenges
A study by the Center for Food Integrity found that only 33% of respondents strongly agreed that they are confident in the safety of their food, as compared to 47% in 2017. Less than half of respondents said they had a positive impression of the food industry.
Consumer trust is integral to the success and profitability of a company. As such, the deficit in trust as caused by the opacity of the agricultural supply chain represents a financial and social loss for the industry. A study from Response Media discovered that 98.5% of consumers would pay more for transparent products, meaning that improving traceability would positively impact a company’s bottom line.
To facilitate traceability with traditional methods requires inordinate amounts of data, labor, and time, rendering it near impossible to do. Those companies that succeed are usually small, family-run and able to obviously prove the origin of their food, such as farmers’ market stalls. Most companies however, face a multitude of obstacles to traceability, beginning with the complexity of the agricultural supply chain.
- Many active parties - suppliers >producers>distributors and storage>retailers>consumers
- No standardization - supply chain parties are siloed and disconnected
- A spread out and global supply chain - any product has countless movements and transitions over a wide geographic span
In between these challenges, data inherently gets lost and miscommunicated, rendering traceability near impossible.
STRATO’s decentralized ledger allows companies to clearly and easily display not only the origin but also the movements of their products. Our platform’s scalability adapts to large companies and supply chains without compromising performance.
- Track the full lifecycle of an agricultural supply
- Provide immutable records of supply usage
- Enhance customer retention and streamline re-ordering
- Improve regulatory (e.g. EPA) reporting capabilities
Through integrating transparency back into the food industry, STRATO bridges the current trust deficit and calm consumer concerns, as well as realistically charge premiums. Moreover companies that use STRATO to implement traceability, could gain new customers as 75% of all consumers would switch to a product that provides transparency beyond the label, up from 39% in 2016.
Solution Benefits
Automate data collection on the full lifecycle of a product
Use smart contracts to ease communication between parties, and automate transactions
Verify identities and information to prevent fraud and mislabelling
Scale by spinning private chains to include an infinite number of parties
Any STRATO insurance solution leverages STRATO's enterprise grade features
RESTful APIs for direct connection of IoT devices to the blockchain network
Identity Management, OAuth and SSO capabilities for simplified IoT authorization and user login
Privacy via private chains to keep any competitive or operations data private
Enterprise Data Modeling for integration of existing and future food supply chain models
