TE-FOOD and Ambrosus comparison

TE-FOOD
TE-FOOD
Published in
4 min readDec 12, 2017

--

Short decription

Ambrosus
Food and medicine quality ecosystem using sensor hardware, blockchain protocol, and smart contracts.

TE-FOOD
Fresh food supply and quality ecosystem, which tracks livestock and fresh food from farm to table, involving supply chain companies, consumers, and authorities.

Traceability hierarchy

The basic difference between the two solutions is in the system’s structure

Ambrosus

  • Client layer (sensor hardware)
  • Blockchain protocol layer

TE-FOOD

  • Client layer (B2B app, consumer app, authority tools, sensor hardware)
  • Blockchain protocol layer

Ambrosus receives data from its sensor hardware, and the third party traceability / logistics solution of the customer. This means the system requires that the supply chain companies use a third party system to identify the animals/food products, and bind manual data to them. This structure predetermines that Ambrosus can be used in regions like Europe, where at least internal (within a supply chain company) traceability is commonly used.

As TE-FOOD’s target markets are emerging countries, where traceability, and even logistics systems are rarely used, a top-to-bottom solution is a better fit. While it can provide solution for larger companies to interface the data from their own traceability / logistics solution, it also provides easy-to-use mobile client applications for those companies which don’t use any tracking software.

It has to be noted, that the sensor hardware of Ambrosus is planned to be more cutting edge than the one of TE-FOOD. While both solution monitors and logs item movement, and environmental conditions of transported items, Ambrosus’ sensors assess and monitor the food’s physical attributes too.

Traction

Ambrosus

  • Product under development
  • Pilots underway

TE-FOOD

  • More than 6000 business customers, daily 400,000 transactions, serving 30 million consumers
  • Consumer app: 50,000 downloads, B2B app: 10,000 downloads on Google Play

User focus

Ambrosus
Supply chain companies, consumers (?)
(they write about rewarding consumers to check food history data, but we couldn’t find any description of a consumer mobile app)

TE-FOOD
Supply chain companies, governments/authorities, consumers

TE-FOOD emphasizes the involvement of governments / authorities, as an important participant in food security. TE-FOOD provides consultation services for governments regarding enforcement, sanctioning, and communication of the traceability program implementation.

Markets

Ambrosus
Not specified / all markets

TE-FOOD
Emerging countries

Product focus

Ambrosus
Food (use cases about olive oil and Swiss cheese), medicine

Reading the documents of Ambrosus, they plan RFID based identification of items. Due to the much higher cost of RFID (compared to QR code based tags), it determines that Ambrosus can be marketable in developed countries, and for higher margin food products (e.g. olive oil, wine, medicine).

TE-FOOD
Livestock and fresh food (pig, chicken, eggs, cattle, lamb, fish & seafood, fruits & vegetables, arable crops)

TE-FOOD’s solution is one of the cheapest on the market, which enables us to be competitive on the emerging markets, and in the lower margin fresh food sector.

Technology

Ambrosus

  • Sensor hardware
  • Blockchain protocol
  • Marketplace

TE-FOOD

  • QR code and RFID based labels (plastic and paper based)
  • B2B mobile app
  • Web based desktop app
  • Consumer mobile app
  • Sensor hardware
  • Blockchain protocol
  • Marketplace

Token usage

Ambrosus

  • Supply chain participants will need to pay by AMB to use Ambrosus’s blockchain traceability ledger.
  • Consumers are rewarded to check food history information.

TE-FOOD

  • Just like Ethereum users pay gas price for transactions, supply chain participants will need to pay by TECoins for transactions to use TE-FOOD’s blockchain traceability ledger.
  • Supply chain companies can request paid value added information from their suppliers.
  • Consumers get TECoins as reward for using our consumer mobile app in retail, reading the QR code and viewing the food history, so the system incentives conscious consumer behavior.

Potential cooperation

Since there are a lot of global food supply chains, and both company wants to provide a global solution, there is a lot of sense in a cooperation.

Example:

Vietnam is one of the world’s largest Pangasius fish exporters. TE-FOOD is planned to be extended to track fish in 2018. But currently TE-FOOD can only track the items until they are shipped to Europe. If Ambrosus has fish product manufacturers/wholesalers/retailers as customers in Europe, they can benefit from the food history information TE-FOOD can provide. For such cases, building a communication bridge between Ambrosus and TE-FOOD could provide advantages for every participant.

Disclaimer: We collected the above data from Ambrosus’ web site and documents. We apologize if we missed any information.

--

--

TE-FOOD
TE-FOOD
Editor for

TE-FOOD is the world’s largest publicly accessible, blockchain based farm-to-table food traceability system.