VeriFood at 2018 Consensus Hackathon
How VeriFood’s Smart Contract Food Verification System Hacked the Microsoft Challenge at the 2018 Consensus Hackathon
“On average, one local farm closes down every day.” Olivia Blachflower, Director of Wholesale & Distribution at GrowNYC, opened with a powerful introductory statement on the morning of May 12th. This year’s main Coindesk Challenge was to use blockchain technologies to improve the trackability and transparency of GrowNYC’s food supply chain, from farm, to warehouse, to retail outlet, to consumers. 32 teams had 24 hours to create an application for tackling this problem with the help of sponsors such as Microsoft, AlphaPoint, Qtum and others.
To hack the hackathon, our team entered as a group of five people: Carlos Lovera, Cristina Gravel, Raymond Chavez, Nicholas Murray and Yi Zu. As a Data Researcher for New Alchemy, I leverage my knowledge on crypto use cases to identify how and where blockchain technology can be applied to specific real-world problems. When first discussing potential solutions to the main problem our team had one common question: how do we verify and authenticate the origin of local food? Nick mentioned how his past experience at a restaurant, revealed that restaurants, although claiming the local nature of their foods, can serve cheaper food without customers knowing the actual origin of the food.
Currently, there is a lack of transparency between consumers and restaurants claiming that they serve locally-sourced foods. Consumers rely on trusting restaurants’ claims about their ingredients, who themselves rely on manually asking farms for the origin of products. This creates an asynchronous environment, where certain parties can be supplying incomplete or false information to other parties.
Based on the existing problem in verifying the authenticity of the food, we decided to create VeriFood: Transparent ecosystem for web platform incorporating a food verification system, a social network and digital marketplace for raising the farmers’ visibility, restaurants’ accountability, and consumers’ confidence on food origin.
The project implemented smart contracts to ensure the local origin of the delivered food through a hard-coded distance limit between the farm and the restaurant, in the case of the project we restricted the radius to farms and restaurants in New York state. Through this transparent web platform, consumers know the origin and freshness of their served food and can rate restaurants for the quality. These ratings reward restaurants with access to an exclusive digital marketplace where farmers and restaurants can engage in more efficient transactions.
The front-end was developed using Angular 5 and TypeScript while leveraging the Material UI framework. The digital marketplace connected to AlphaPoint’s API and the smart contracts were created using Microsoft’s Azure Blockchain Workbench. Challenges arose during the development phase where our team had to integrate Azure’s continuous deployment service to with our web application. After resolving the issue, we presented and demoed the application to notable founders and executives of blockchain companies including Joe Ventura (Founder of AlphaPoint), Robin Zhong (Co-founder of Nebulas), Jordan Earls (Co-Founder of Qtum) and many others.
Overall, out of the 7 projects competing in the Microsoft Challenge, we are proud to say that VeriFood was chosen as the winner for its ability to use demonstrate how blockchain technology can improve the food supply chain verification process using Microsoft’s Blockchain Workbench platform. Be sure to check our project here. The hackathon revealed how a tight deadline, right incentives and supportive sponsors can propel the development of impactful applications to solve challenging problems. We would like to thank Coindesk for organizing the event and Microsoft and AlphaPoint for the technical support in seamlessly integrating their technology in our project. If you are interested in learning more about developing blockchain applications, I recommend checking out the New Alchemy blog.
