Making Farm to Table a Reality — Why We Invested in Tilkal

Today’s global food industry is a scandal.

Despite enormous advancement over the last 15 years, the €19.4trillion industry remains ridden with egregious mishandling and oversight at every step from production to consumption.

Let’s take a look at a few facts :

1. 75% of consumers do not trust the food they buy (Kantar)

2. 420,000 people die every year from food scandals, totalling a loss of 33 million healthy life years (WHO)

3. Food safety outbreaks cost an estimated €30billion / year (European Comission)

4. Europeans assign 14% of expenditures to feeding themselves and their familys (Deloitte)

5. Global demand for food is expected to increase by 60% by 2050 (HBR)

When we consider this reality in light of a rapidly evolving market landscape (mounting exposure, increasing globalization, ever-shifting regulatory framework, growing power of consumers, utter ineptitude at handling crises), the stakes have never been higher for the food industry.

So what’s really going on here? With all the momentum and energy around this movement globally, why aren’t things getting better?

Amongst other issues, the complexity and fragmentation of the food supply chain makes it nearly impossible to track products from production to distrubtion today.

At the core of this a lack of traceability.

Traceability in the food industry can be considered w / r / t:

1. Product transparency (i.e. industrials and retailers don’t want to be the last in the industry to be able to provide customers wit accurate information) and

2. Operational efficiency (i.e. stock management, product recalls, analytics)

We’ve already seen meaningful advancement around food traceability within a given supplier / industrial / retailer, but we haven’t cracked the issue of data sharing. In turn, we’ve seen no lasting progress around this increasingly dangerous, increasingly impactful problem.

Providers are preoccupied with both guarding control over what they share, and preserving the integrity of the information shared.

Enter: Tilkal — here to reaffirm some semblance of confidence for suppliers and consumers alike via its blockchain-based, real-time, supply chain traceability solution.

Tilkal is one of the only solutions of its kind that has been successfully deployed — in its first year of operations, Tilkal is tracking over 8 million products across ten product categories and working with key players like Groupe Casino.

A smart use of the blockchain technology:

Tilkal’s solution is built around a blockchain platform which makes it possible to:

1. Ensure unaltered data

2. Allow traceability without forcing all participants to disclose their customers and suppliers data (i.e. they retain control of what they share)

3. Keep IT costs low (enabling the participation of smaller stakeholders)

The simplicity of Tilkal’s blockchain technology of choice (time stamping) provides a huge advantage over public blockchains (Ethereum) and other permissioned blockchain protocols (Hyperledger) w/r/t scalability (more scalability in the amount of data that can be processed) and implementation (better ability to deploy nodes hostable by all key stakeholders)

And it’s this asset of implementation that guarantees that the network remains distributed and dominant players in the supply chain don’t take control (i.e. the reason to use a blockchain network in the first place).

A pragmatic and realistic approach to traceability:

We are particularly drawn to the mindset of the Tilkal team. While unadulterated optimism certainly has its place in minds of entrepreneurs, we see enormous value in entrepreneurs who can innovate in a way that enables realistic adoption and adaptation of new technology. In our eyes, this dose of realism around implementation has been and will continue to be integral to Tilkal’s operational success.

We are proud to stand behind a team whose solution builds on pragmatism in that:

1. If your solution hinges on having 100% of the data, it is unlikely to work

2. Without short term ROIs, clients will not pay for large scale developments

Indeed, in this case, as in many, perfection is the enemy of progress.

While many traceability solutions focus on obtaining 100% of information on a given product, Tilkal differentiates itself by setting key players on the right track towards supply chain transparency and traceability, and enabling them to begin to reap the benefits of this progression from inception — even when the ‘perfection’ of information may still be miles away.

With three good heads on its shoulders (Matthieu Hug, Sébastien Gaïde and Joseph Azar), and wearing glasses that aren’t too rose-tinted, Tilkal has built a solution driven by its core technology that delivers value to its implementers from day one through the facilitation of transparency and communication with end-users through consumer-oriented web apps. The team developed an analytics layer that helps clients leverage this increased visibility on their supply chain in real time to improve stock management and better handle product recalls.

A European player:

With the exponentially increasing volume of data generated, it is pertinent to contain the power over industrial data both decentralized and within Europe.

Clearly, the discussion around GDRP and personal data privacy in Europe is clearly extremely hot topically and increasingly important, but we have heard less around the equally high-stakes subject of sovereignty of industrial data.

It’s time to shift that dynamic.

If, indeed, this industrial data has a strategic and economic value, we want to control it, not to let [insert Big Tech of your choice] control it.

Here, the keeper of the data is, in fact, not a single player, but the consortium of stakeholders of the supply chain , so this “transformed” data retains its DNA in its new European, decentralized, secure, but actually usable form.

Tilkal & Ventech:

Tilkal is a perfect match for our Seed strategy here at Ventech.

As primarily Series A investors, we aim to primarily complete Seed rounds in very ambitious projects led by outstanding entrepreneurs in areas that speak to the passions of Ventech’s partners — ie Claire Houry’s passion for tech-enabled sustainability

Tilkal has strong ambition and clear vision enabled by a great team led by Matthieu, serial entrepreneur and previous founder of RunMyProcess (sold to Fujitsu).

We’re excited and proud to support this team, their technology and its wonderful implications on their journey to drastically improve traceability in the food industry !

Thanks to Thomas Turelier and Alexandra Sloves for co-writing this article with insights from the Tilkal team (Matthieu Hug) and Claire Houry.