TE-FOOD’s achievements in 2018, and plans for 2019

Recognition, Compliance, Adoption — the three most important elements for blockchain companies to prosper. We have been working on them constantly. Here we provide a summary of our activities in 2018.

We started the process of becoming a global traceability solution provider by establishing partnerships with several organizations which can help in our business development.

Auchan

After piloting TE-FOOD for almost 24 months in Vietnam, global suparmarket giant Auchan decided to implement it in five countries (France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Senegal). Implementation already started in France, the other countries will follow during 2019.

Deloitte

TE-FOOD was seeking for a global sales and implementation partner, which is trusted by governments and large companies. We partnered with the Hungarian branch of Deloitte for this reason. We have some interesting opportunities, we think 2019 will bring the first results.

Nongshim Data System

We partnered with the IT branch of Korean food giant Nongshim to provide blockchain based traceability solutions in South Korea.

FAO

FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations partnered with TE-FOOD to achieve a better understanding of blockchain technology, and its implications for the statisticans responsible for official statistics of the livestock sector.

United Nations SFS Programme

TE-FOOD is accepted by the United Nations as a partner to the Sustainable Food Systems (SFS) Programme. This helps us access food industry professionals and companies which are also partner of the SFS Programme.

TERRA

TE-FOOD is selected to join TERRA Food & AgTech Accelerator’s program. After assessing hundreds of applications, they shortlisted 160 startups to pitch their ideas, finally selecting 17 to start pilot projects. TE-FOOD is one of the 17 selected applicants, as the only German company.

GS1

TE-FOOD and GS1 partnered to implement GS1 standards for products, locations, and events in the traceability processes of TE-FOOD.

Other important partnerships during 2018

• Tomochain — to work on a long term blockchain solution for the FoodChain.
• Tier 1 Network — to enter the Indian market.
• University of Debrecen and Laurel Group — to develop a blockchain based food traceability training material, joint R&D projects, and wine traceability implementations.
• Telenorma AG — to sell and implement TE-FOOD in Germany.
• BIG GROUP S.r.l — to provide sales and implementation capacity towards potential Italian customers.
• HalalTrail — to provide tailor made traceability solution for the halal food industry.
• Wyoming Certified Beef — to provide traceability solution for free range cattle ranchers in the USA
• Trace Alliance — to provide multichain solution for food companies.
• QSM — to sell and implement TE-FOOD in Poland.
• New Zealand Trade Centre — to implement food traceability for exported New Zealand fruit products, as well as for fruit products imported from Vietnam.

TE-FOOD is listed amongst the TOP 10 Blockchains in terms of blockchain activity. The site Blocktivity compares blockchains by the number of operations. As one blockchain transaction can often mean more events (operations), the most realistic measure of adoption is to compare this metrics.

TE-FOOD is in the TOP 10 Blockchains as the smallest market cap project with ~5 million USD. The market cap average of the top 10 is 8,2 billion USD, while the median is 93,5 million USD.

During 2018, we made major restructuring on TE-FOOD’s technology side.

Our main goal is to provide customizable and affordable traceability solutions for companies with any level of technological readiness.

What does this mean?

• Customizable
  We don’t believe in one size fits all solutions. Each food category has different roles, processes and data types to collect. We aim to provide tailor made solutions for them.
• Affordable
  Most companies in the food industry have low margins. Enabling them to utilize modern technology on an affordable cost level is a strategic advantage.
• Any level of technological readiness
  Companies are on different level of digitization. Most companies in the emerging countries don’t have any local software, while most companies in the developed countries have some kind. These two target customers require different approach and different services to reach the same result.

Why is TE-FOOD’s approach unique?

Other software

• TE-FOOD joins R&D project to develop AI based meat quality checker application
• TE-FOOD brings farms to a new level with Deep Data Analysis module for improved productivity
• Livestock Registry and Management System for governments

There are many use cases for utility tokens. Some of them are — at this moment — no more than idealistic visions which lack regulatory compliance, some others are accepted by customers and authorities.

TFD is amongst the tokens which grant right to access functions or features which are not available to those who don’t own tokens. Using tokens for software licensing simplifies the global access to the system.

Token economics, where tokens serve a means of payment are alway prone to the velocity problem (besides being problematic in regards of regulatory compliance in several countries). In case of tokenized software licences, the customers have to hold the necessary amount of tokens as long as they use the ecosystem.

Without regulatory compliance and acceptance by real customers, crypto companies have no future.

Before our token sale, we proactively contacted the SEC equivalent authority of Germany through our partner company, Telenorma AG, and collaborated with them to create a token economics, which can lift us from the gray area where crypto companies exist all around the world. Luckily, the financial supervisory authority was helpful, and after several months of work, the token economics of TFD was born.

As a result, for the first time in the history of crypto, a major securities commission released an opinion, which referred to, that based on its economics, the TFD token is not a security, it doesn’t need a licence under the German Banking Act, or the Payment Services Supervision Act.

What does this result exactly mean? Many companies said that their token is a utility, but many times the securities commission of their country thinks otherwise. The tokenized licence model we worked out is finally one which is compliant with the regulations.

In 2019, we continue the work for more adoption, interesting use cases, and more product development.

Traceability

We are planning several customized processes for different food categories, but we realize them when there is a real world use case for it.

We have pilots in planning and implementation phase as well, we will make announcements about them as soon as we are allowed.

While the overall structure of TE-FOOD is ready, there are several areas where product development is necessary:

• Product recall management
• Processed food traceability
• More sophisticated parameterization possibility

IoT

We think that the future of food traceability lies on IoT, Artificial Intelligence, and Blockchain technologies working together closely.

• IoT — for data collection
• Artificial Intelligence — for data verification and analysis
• Blockchain — for data storage and automatic processing

We plan to partner companies from the IoT sector to provide automatic data collection, and integrate them to TE-FOOD’s ecosystem.

Security tokens

We believe security tokens will be the buzzword of 2019. While currently this area is in its infancy, the value proposition is so strong that we expect faster evolution than we have ever experienced.

We also wrote a blog post about how it will affect agricultural financing. We are planning to be involved in this industry.

Charity

While there are strong arguments to support the implementation of our food safety oriented solutions, there are companies and organizations in developing countries, which can not afford the implementation.

We decided to establish a TE-FOOD charity program, and offer free implementation and maintenance for selected use cases to take our part in the efforts of making the world a better place. We expect the first steps in this initiative in February, 2019.

Long term

We have a long term vision of what TE-FOOD could become in the future:
a global ecosystem for food supply chains, based on five synergistic pillars.

At this moment, we are in a very early stage of this vision, but we are working step by step on the realization of this concept during the next years. As we move forward, we will reveal more about the plan.

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/