This startup uses Blockchain for traceability solutions

Food produced on farms travels miles before it reaches our table – and is vulnerable to a number of risks linked to climate change and biodiversity loss.

With new technologies, food tracking has changed to a data-driven approach aimed at tracking and tracing products. Similarly, with the implementation of blockchain technology in supply chain management, an improved efficiency of products and services is expected.

One such traceability platform is TraceX Technologies, which builds climate-resistant and sustainable supply chains to increase trust and value for business.

In an exclusive interaction with Analytics India MagazineSrivatsa Sreenivasarao, CEO and co-founder and Anil Nadig, co-founder of TraceX Technologies discuss how the platform implements blockchain-powered traceability solutions.

TraceX Technologies is a blockchain-powered agritech platform that improves supply chain traceability and transparency. Founded in 2019, TraceX aims to build clean, transparent and traceable supply chains across the food and agriculture ecosystem.

Digitizing the supply chain from start to finish will mean that all stakeholders in the supply chain can add, view and exchange data in real time. The data collected will act as a single source of information that cannot be changed or tampered with.

CEO Srivatsa Sreenivasarao says TraceX’s blockchain-powered traceability tool is a ground-breaking solution to address supply chain challenges in the food ecosystem.

“Traceability is an important tool that addresses problems due to food hazards, provides reliable product information and guarantees the credibility of the product. The farm management system ensures the quality of the product with adherence to sustainable practices, and the recall management helps solve food contamination issues in the supply chain.”

Jivabhumi, the origin of TraceX

“Prior to TraceX, we had founded ‘Jivabhumi’, a community-backed social enterprise that connects conscious consumers with local farmers. Through our experience with Jivabhumi, we had a thorough and deep understanding of some of the issues plaguing complex food supply chains. This was the genesis of TraceX, says co-founder Anil Nadig.

‘Jivabhumi’ is a community-supported agriculture initiative that was born with the idea of ​​connecting the farmer and the conscious consumer. Launched in July 2015, the venture is a farm-to-table model to provide locally sourced, healthy and sustainable food to the consumer with a sense of satisfaction for the farmer. It gave the team a deep insight into the various challenges plaguing the food chains.

With traceability increasing in relevance today than ever before, more and more consumers are keen to know about the origins and processes of the food they buy. Anil Nadig believes that due to the opacity of supply chains, consumers today have no way to track and trace the products they buy.

“Traceability in the supply chain bridges the information and trust gap between consumers, agricultural businesses and farmers.”

The team believes that transparency builds trust and is on a mission to create credible, connected and sustainable supply chains for the world.

The role of traceable supply chain for food safety

According to the WHO, an estimated 600 million – almost 1 in 10 people – become ill after eating contaminated food, resulting in the loss of 33 million healthy life years.

This is the scenario, and Srivatsa Sreenivasarao emphasizes the need to improve food traceability in supply chains. He believes that such traceability is one of the most important preventive measures to control the spread of food contamination and to achieve maximum food safety.

“Food companies are responsible for the origin of the food they grow, distribute and sell. End-to-end visibility of supply chains with real-time traceability, monitoring of product flow along the supply chain and a collaboration platform between stakeholders help build a credible and secure food supply chain.”

The blockchain-enabled proprietary platform provides end-to-end traceability, reducing tracking time from days to seconds and facilitating accurate and targeted product recalls.

After receiving an overwhelming response from the positive impact of their product, TraceX is working to further enhance it by leveraging Asset Tokenization (NFT), AI, ML, IoT to provide digital empowerment to all supply chain participants.

The goal is to harness the power of Web3 technologies to build a large distributed autonomous supply chain network for food and agriculture businesses.

“Over the next few months, we plan to expand our offerings to include carbon offsetting and corporate climate action targets, along with aggressively scaling up operations in international geographies such as Europe and North America,” says Anil Nadig.

Address supply chain challenges

Food and agricultural supply chains in recent decades have been disrupted due to increasing population, globalization and increasing health awareness among consumers.

Asked about initiatives to accelerate technology adoption in the industry, Srivatsa Sreenivasarao said that to feed the growing population, agricultural processes should use technology – making it productive and profitable for the smallholders.

“The Sustainable Development Goals provide a vision for global development, and technology can accelerate this process. Blockchain-powered traceability solutions are a game changer in agriculture.”

Srivatsa Sreenivasarao also enumerates ways blockchain can address challenges in supply chains:

• Blockchain bridges stakeholders by providing unified data with end-to-end visibility. This in turn increases the operational efficiency of the supply chain.
• Blockchain-based supply chain systems provide track, trace and provenance – helping with easy product recalls and reducing food loss.
• Real-time capture of data helps to capture analyzes for better insight and save costs.
• Streamlining activities such as production planning and inventory management increases productivity and profitability.
• The digital identity given to a product ensures transparency and helps deliver a safe and sustainable end product to the consumer.

The B2B SaaS platform with its solutions improves efficiency, visibility and compliance across agricultural and food supply chains.

Turn in the wake of technological innovations

The co-founders believe that the platform gives a digital identity to each product – by enabling the availability of real-time detailed information about the product in its life cycle. This means that the time-stamped information cannot be changed – enabling a seamless transfer of data between stakeholders with the greatest possible trust and transparency.

TraceX’s Farm Management Solutions and Post-Harvest management capture the story of the product from farm to fork along with its social and environmental footprint. It then stores them in digital ledgers.

“TraceX helps companies and brands enable transparent communication between producers and consumers and facilitate decentralized marketplaces for the various stakeholders in the value chain. It also plans to invest in carbon management solutions that rest on the foundation of trust and accountability to deliver a sustainable future. The cloud platform enables better data security, easy traceability and improved interoperability, says Anil Nadig.

He further adds that the immutability feature of blockchain helps in the non-alteration of data as it is stored in cryptographically enabled blocks – making it immutable.

“Each of the blocks contains the hash value of itself as well as the previous one and is linked retroactively. The distributive and decentralized nature together with the consensus mechanism ensures that the originality of data is maintained.” This enables auditability of captured data and builds integrity into the entire ecosystem.

The food traceability market faces challenges from manual data entry and record keeping systems, fragmented supply chains, changes in consumer purchasing and consumption patterns, along with stringent regulatory requirements.

To solve these problems, TraceX captures real-time data in immutable ledgers, helps with recall management and ensures food safety. A single source of information helps establish verifiable data – ensuring product credibility and compliance.