Data Transparency in Food Supply Chains

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

There are a lot of reports of consumers wanting more transparency into where their food is coming from. Several companies have popped up to try to tackle this challenge, including Canada-based TheoryMesh. Co-founder and CEO Chris Bunio says they utilize blockchain technology to collect data from farm to fork.

Bunio… “We are in the business of creating traceability transparency platforms for the supply chain. So looking at what happens as we get food literally from the first steps of growing that food on the farm, picking up all the data that kind of happens along the production of that into the supply chain and being able to carry that through to the consumer in different ways, depending on what types of things they want to see.”

But this may cause some to ask: what’s in it for the farmer? Bunio sees real value for farmers who store this data digitally.

Bunio… “For something like organic certification, it's typically all on paper. So that is effectively dead data to any process that you want to connect with. But we're able to digitize a lot of that, provide it to them in ways that they can go through and kind of check the information themselves before they get into their organic certification processes. So it's starting to cut down on some of the time that's required to do things like that certification. That opens the door for them to add label claims or things like that to their marketing. So there's quite a bit of work that we can do to contribute to small farmers and their own marketing pieces.”

Learn more at TheoryMesh.com.