TE-FOOD is a food traceability ecosystem on blockchain. It aims to provide solution for companies with any level of technological readiness to join and track their products.
It will also integrate service providers for the contracting, management, and clearing of services in its ecosystem.
Summary
Key points for those who don’t want to read the whole post:
- The structure of TE-FOOD is built to easily provide solution for those companies which don’t have any software (farm management, ERP, traceability) as well as for those which already track their products.
- While TE-FOOD provides its own permissioned blockchain, we will be flexible to provide solution for supply chains which plan to store their data in a third party blockchain like Vechain, Waltonchain, IBM Food Trust, Zebi, etc.
- We don’t believe in “one size fits all” solutions. Each food category has different processes, roles, and data sets. We focus on developing a framework which enables us and our implementation partners to quickly build custom processes and forms for different use cases.
- We believe that the future value of the ecosystem will be based on integrating many IoT tools and third party products/services, we build all kinds of easy-to-implement interfaces for these connections.
Business reasons behind the tech
Most of the supply chain traceability solutions (crypto or non-crypto)
- try to build a generalist solution
- focus on logistics traceability
- are based on IoT data streams
- provide just the infrastructure, and require that companies integrate their local traceability software
Our approach is different:
- Generalist solutions can’t follow the differences in the processes of supply chains, thus they will be more of an overhead for companies, without providing incentives. We believe in tailor made solutions, as pig, egg, banana, or cashew supply chains have different roles, processes, and data sets.
- Logistics traceability is important for proof of origin, but not enough for a number of purposes (e.g. compliance with import regulations). There are specific data types for each food category to be logged to provide a full picture of the growing/animal husbandry.
- While IoT will be the most important data source for food traceability in the future, as it’s based on physical hardware, it’s expensive to implement, and adoption takes longer. We can’t rely on that entirely, we need quick and easy manual data entry solution, especially on the emerging markets.
- In developed countries, most supply chain companies have some kind of traceability, farm management, ERP system, so a traceability project is mostly about interfacing them to interlink the information. But in emerging countries, only a handful of larger food companies have such technological background, most companies have no technology at all. We want to provide solutions for all of them for seamless integration.
The TE-FOOD solution
The structure of our technology focuses on synergic elements which can be used or omitted according to the requirements of the participants in the specific supply chain. The overall goal is to be able to provide solution for food companies with any kind of technological readiness and infrastructure requirements.
Physical Identification Materials
As food traceability is based on tracking real world items, it needs a physical gateway which is understandable to machines as well. To identify the tracked physical objects (products, bunch of products, locations, etc.), TE-FOOD uses
- plastic security seals with QR code
- plastic identification tags with RFID
- paper based label stickers with QR code
Client Applications
Different companies have different technological preparedness. TE-FOOD intends to provide solution for all of them.
- B2B and Consumer mobile apps used by the supply chain participants to scan identification materials and request/enter data about them.
- A web based consumer app helps consumers to view the product history in case they don’t use our Consumer mobile app. Upon scanning the QR code on a product with a QR code reader mobile app, a custom URL is decoded from the QR code, and sends the user to a web based landing page which shows the same information as the Consumer mobile app.
- A specialized IoT API enables the food companies to integrate data provided by their sensors to the traceability process. The API provides custom parameterizing possibilities regarding the data to be recorded on blockchain.
- Open interfaces for supply chain companies which already have software to manage logistics or farm activity data, to send/request information automatically, instead of manual entry through the B2B mobile app.
Process Framework
The core part of the system, contains the framework to manage the B2B processes and functions, generates the traceability documentation, and manages the blockchain ledger plugins. Using the Process Framework, TE-FOOD’s implementation partners can use process templates created for specific food categories, or create a new, customised process template with its data sets, roles, process steps and forms.
All of its functionality implemented as a set of future-proof containerised stateless micro services in the cloud, in order to allow flexible deployment, provide geolocation independent fast operation and help to avoid scalability and availability issues. These services respond to all client — such as mobile, web or interfaces to remote ERP-like systems — requests and manage connections to other backing micro services.
Parameter Repository
Contains all possibly needed data in TE-FOOD Process Framework from user specific data to traceability event prototypes (e.g. feeding types). Because of the necessity of managing relations between different data sources in large volume during processing traceability workflows, the efficiency of the data management layer is essential aspect of designing and developing the production architecture. In order to fulfil these requirements TE-FOOD Process Framework uses high throughput and fault-tolerant IaaS and PaaS cloud solutions as backing RDBMS resources which has been widely utilised by leading technology companies as well as implements carefully crafted relational data models.
In the first development phase, every transactional data which has been written into the Parameter Repository also forwarded to the Blockchain Plugin Framework. This will allow our customers to be able to validate every processed and displayed data against blockchain which provides credibility and immutability. In future releases it is planned that every traceability data recordings will happen in the Parameter Repository and TE-FOOD Blockchain simultaneously.
Traceability Document Repository
When products reach the end of their route in the supply chain, the framework generates a journal document from the traceability data, which will be displayed for the consumers. It also contains links pointing to the blockchain hashes respective to the transactions of the specific product.
Traceability Document Repository implemented on distributed NOSQL databases, but later it could be moved to IPFS and some functionality may be delegated to Master Nodes.
Blockchain Plugin Framework
Manages the interfaces to store/request data in the blockchain ledger.
The Blockchain Plugin Framework enables food companies to store their traceability data in various blockchains (TE-FOOD Blockchain, Vechain, IBM Food Trust, Zebi, etc.), or send data to an external system through the OriginTrail protocol.
Companies which intend to use an external blockchain can still use TE-FOOD’s identification materials, client applications, and ecosystem, but their traceability data will be interfaced to the selected third-party blockchain. To support this flexible structure, we designed our masternode structure to be involved in interface transactions as well.
Ecosystem Applications
As the ecosystem grows, it will collect tens of thousands or more food companies. Introducing different products and services for this customer base is a win-win scenario for the ecosystem, for the solution providers, and for the food companies as well.
Supply chain management, data analytics, IoT, lab testing, insurance are just some examples of products/services which can be offered to the participants.
We build APIs which can be used by third party solution providers for the contracting, management, and clearing of these business relationships withing the TE-FOOD ecosystem.
While most of the products/services will be offered by third party solution providers, TE-FOOD may also provide ecosystem applications, like the Deep Data Analysis for farms.
TE-FOOD Blockchain
TE-FOOD’s own distributed/decentralized data ledger. This component provides the credible possibility of verification of every elementary and aggregated data against cryptographically hashed and immutably stored data in blockchain. TE-FOOD Blockchain is likewise the platform of our solution’s distributed software components (aka Dapps).
The fact that TE-FOOD provides blockchain functionality integrated with its purposeful traceability solution makes early adopter food and agricultural complies capable to implement blockchain fast and cost effective. We provide private and permissioned blockchain solution as well, so food companies can select whichever fits their needs.
TE-FOOD Block Explorer
A web and mobile application to check blocks/transactions in the TE-FOOD blockchain.
We tried to build our experiences and market knowledge into this structure. However there are limitations of the technology as well as the market’s approach towards decentralized applications which we had to consider. This structure may change a lot during the next years as we experience more and more use cases, supply chains and face the difficulties. This means our structure is not final. As we are at the absolute beginning of the blockchain era, it will evolve a lot.
TE-FOOD is the world’s largest publicly accessible, farm-to-table fresh food traceability solution. Started in 2016, it serves 6000+ business customers, and handles 400,000 business transactions each day.
Website: www.te-food.com
Telegram group: https://t.me/tefood
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TE_FOOD
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TE_FOOD/
