Food Data Market goes global with EU Commission’s NGI Atlantic
We live in a world full of data. An increasing amount of data is collected each day from the environment around us. In food supply chains, data is collected at multiple points and it can provide in-depth insight into production, answering questions like “What were the production conditions?” and “What were the temperature, humidity, and sunlight levels?”. Data gives the farmers — who are at the beginning of supply chains — the opportunity to stand out, highlight their good practices — like organic farming, for example — and get fairly compensated for their efforts. However, giving farmers the ability to monetize the value of their data and showcase the quality of their work has been challenging in the past. With that in mind, Food Data Market (FDM) was created, a decentralized marketplace that incentivizes data sharing with the goal of contributing to sustainable supply chains. Now, Trace Labs, together with our partners Kakaxi Inc., is taking the next step for FDM within the EU Commission’s NGI Atlantic initiative.
Inclusive data marketplaces are a core element of sustainable supply chains. They bring a fair distribution of gains along supply chains and give citizens and organizations ownership over their data. Food Data Market is an open-source software infrastructure built within the NGI Ledger project. It utilizes the OriginTrail protocol for trusted data exchange. FDM is a comprehensive marketplace supporting new economic models for the future of not only the food industry, but all supply chains. It encompasses trust, neutrality, and inclusiveness, which are the foundation of distributed ledger technologies. At the same time, it aligns the incentives of participants along the supply chain. This is enabled by a privacy-by-design approach that allows upstream supply chain partners (e.g., farmers and cooperatives) to take control over their data, attach a price to it, and sell it to supply chain partners that recognize its value.
Food Data Market goes across the pond with Kakaxi and NGI Atlantic
Working towards deploying FDM technology in supply chains globally, Trace Labs has partnered with Kakaxi, an American company striving to improve data collection with upstream supply chain partners by deploying solar-powered IoT devices equipped with a range of sensors to capture images and data on metrics including temperature, humidity, solar radiation, and rain gauge. Kakaxi is also one of the winners of the Trace Alliance’s open call (an inclusive hub within the OriginTrail Ecosystem) and has managed to successfully connect their product to the OriginTrail Decentralized Network.
This EU-US partnership will result in the development of new ways of incentivizing data capture in global supply chains by using a decentralized data marketplace and a business model to ensure sustainability. The beyond-state-of-the-art privacy-enabling technology will contribute to the development of a more fair and inclusive data economy in EU and US agrifood supply chains. Trace Labs and Kakaxi are also proud to announce that their joint solution has been supported by the NGI Atlantic initiative, which is funded by the European Commission and whose main goal for the NGI Atlantic project is to bridge EU-US research on the Next Generation Internet. Trace Labs and Kakaxi are planning to kick-off the NGI Atlantic project on the 1st of December. In the following six months of the project’s execution, we will see at least three supply chains globally benefiting from the implementation of Kakaxi devices on the field and their data being monetized using the FDM.
First project partners: Distillery seeking to redefine Irish whiskey
Not an hour away from Dublin, in the county of Kildare, lies Monasterevin, the home of an exciting new venture aiming to reinvent Irish whiskey. The founders have repurposed an old mill into a new distillery that will carry the same name as the town it resides in — Monasterevin. Quality, sustainability, and transparency are key Monasterevin values and will help to form the cornerstone of their brand positioning and customer promise. Today’s consumers are increasingly cautious and skeptical about the sourcing of products and their underlying ingredients and that is why Monasterevin seeks new ways to support their claims with trust and integrity through certification, science, and technology.
For that purpose, they wish to capture as much relevant data about their supply chain as possible and Kakaxi devices are a great fit to collect key data and imagery that will serve to substantiate claims on Irish grain provenance and product authenticity. Devices will be installed with selected farmers that are Monasterevin’s partners and the brand will be able to purchase the required data from farmers as required. This way, farmers remain the owners of their data and are also able to re-use it in other ways (e.g., for production optimization and re-selling to other potential partners). Trace Labs and Kakaxi are excited to have the opportunity to partner with such an ambitious and trust-by-design-oriented organization like Monasterevin and are looking forward to seeing the first results in early 2021.
Decentralized data marketplace as a catalyst for enterprise data exchange
The OriginTrail Decentralized Network can turn any siloed data into processed, structured, and trusted information. With the decentralized data marketplace, OriginTrail is getting a fourth dimension: valorized data.
The ability to assign a price to data creates a strong motivation to grow the OriginTrail knowledge graph by making more data discoverable and facilitating more trusted data exchanges. As NGI Atlantic sees to the deployment of a data marketplace in operational environments, the benefits of sharing data will become even more apparent, driving future benefits for all organizations, big and small alike.
