Guest Columns

Perspective:
Cheese Traceability

Creating the Internet of Cheese

Blockchain looks to revolutionize the industry

Robert Wheatley

Robert Wheatley is CEO of Emergent — The Healthy Living Agency, a marketing and communications company focused on food and beverage brand building. He can be reached at bob@emergent-comm.com. He contributes this column exclusively for Cheese Market News®.

For the cheese industry, the digital age is about to arrive. Until now there’s been no real sustainable, cost-effective path to trace product and ingredient activity and performance throughout the supply chain.

Blockchain’s premise is verified, validated processes and visibility of those steps throughout product creation and distribution.

With Blockchain, cheese brands will have real data to support trusted claims and promises around ingredient integrity, faithfulness to standards, commitment to craftsmanship, labeling accuracy and food safety.

“The majority of people don’t trust information about the food they eat. And between 10 to 20 percent of them would be willing to pay more for verified quality,” says Phil Harris, president and co-founder of Ripe.io, a San Francisco based company pioneering the internet of food. “The value proposition for Blockchain is to unlock information desired by consumers concerning why they are choosing one product over another.”

• Change is coming

In 1995 when the internet finally got real traction, no one really anticipated the incredible sea change it would create in virtually every facet of how business is conducted and food brands are built.

Similarly, Blockchain is poised to usher in another transformative era: bringing the benefits of digital technology to the cheese industry, offering an electronic upgrade to every aspect of supply chain activity and how products go to market. The late business management educator, Peter Drucker, summed it up, “What’s measured, improves.”

Mark Baum, chief collaboration officer with Washington, DC-based Food Marketing Institute adds, “on behalf of FMI’s food retailers and their trading partners, we are carefully evaluating the potential for this open source platform, along with the requirements to ensure it is implemented in a way that is consistent with the standards we have been supporting for the complete and accurate flow of information. There are many potential uses and ways to unlock its value.”

• Not just for bankers

Blockchain has already gained ground in other businesses including financial services where it originated, insurance, healthcare and the nascent crypto-currency category, Bitcoin. Kodak Company, once considered virtually dead, recently announced its introduction of Blockchain with photographers to protect and monitor copyright infringements and royalty payments. Kodak is using a Bitcoin like currency to enable purchase of usage rights for registered photos. Kodak’s share value has tripled since the announcement.

Ripe.io’s Harris believes food and agriculture are ideal candidates for this technology. Most likely, the first in will be cheese industry innovators looking for competitive advantage and a tech-enabled path to answering the consumer’s demand for super transparency.

• What is Blockchain?

Blockchain technology employs sensors, scanners and algorithms that can digitize nearly every aspect of product creation workflow. Fundamentally this is how the Internet of Cheese (IoC) can be built.

“More than ever before, stakeholders — both trade and consumer — care about transparency and trust in the supply chain. Up till now there’s not been an efficient way to monitor practices or activities along the path from how dairy animals are maintained, to steps in cheesemaking, to processing and shipping, to finished product handling from dairy farm to dinner plate,” Harris says.

• Digital ledgers and smart contracts

Blockchain builds a digital ledger of how cheese is made and enables smart contracts with participating organizations along the path. Smart contracts can then trigger vendor payments based on verified performance at each step — from milk delivery to safe handling in storage and transportation to a retail outlet — all to spec. Harris believes over time the smart contracts will create efficiencies and help deliver cost savings throughout the manufacturing and distribution process.

At the production plant, the flow of product from milk intake to vat to aging and packaging can be tracked — verifying compliance with accepted methods or standard of identity in cheesemaking. “It’s an elegant tool,” Harris reports, “that brings multiple parties together and creates trusted, attested outcomes during the journey.”

In effect Blockchain installs a “web of trust” by delivering traceability around evidence of performance. The consumer benefit is proof of authenticity and quality, essential to telling the brand’s story in a credible way.

• Security of information

Blockchain’s cloud based system and deployment of sensor technologies (where feasible) removes human intervention. In doing so, it creates authenticated trust, and then enforces this condition by making alteration to digital ledgers extremely difficult.

“All records related to product creation are sitting in a digital ledger in the cloud,” Harris explains. “Any proprietary or custom practices along the creation path can be suppressed. The integrity of confidential information is maintained and there is security around who can access information. Once collected it is very difficult to change the data, thus enabling trusted performance.”

Some examples of Blockchain’s digital oversight capability includes:

• Verified claims made about milk from grass fed animals.

• Steps in cheesemaking that impact flavor profile such as aging.

• Real time monitoring, recording of temperature, moisture and other characteristics and environmental conditions.

• Compliance with Federal Safety and Modernization Act requirements.

• In the case of a product recall, producers can track product (and ingredients) all the way back to the farm in seconds not days.

• Ripe.io and the Blockchain tomato gambit

Harris’ company created an initial Internet-of-Food technology pilot project in collaboration with Ward Berry Farm near Boston. The goal: deliver verified quality and improved flavor in tomatoes to one of Ward’s most important customers, the salad-centric Sweetgreen restaurant chain.

Ripe.io deployed Blockchain and sensors to monitor ripeness, color and sugar content in Ward’s tomato fields. Scanners were used to assess salt, sugar content and pH levels. Environmental conditions such as light, humidity and air temperature also were tracked. Once harvested and in distribution, sensors recorded humidity and temperature conditions as tomatoes made their way to Sweetgreen’s kitchens.

“The outcome was better quality, optimally harvested tomatoes with a verified story Sweetgreen could use in efforts to tell customers about ingredients in their menu items,” says Harris. Sweetgreen was able to specify salty vs. sweet flavor profiles and trust the tomatoes they received would deliver on that requirement.

• Blockchain’s relevance

Trust is a critical component of successful brand marketing in the age of consumer control. It is an active and not passive element in marketing strategy. What’s changed is the consumer’s desire for credible validation and verification of truth, and their interest in knowing what goes on behind the curtain in product creation.
The great opportunity in Blockchain is the ability to bring visibility and proof to the table in brand storytelling.

By doing so stakes in the higher quality game are raised. The consumer ultimately benefits from better, safer products, while producers realize greater efficiencies in the supply chain — it’s a win-win for the future of cheese brands and food communication as we know it.

CMN

The views expressed by CMN’s guest columnists are their own opinions and do not necessarily reflect those of Cheese Market News®.

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