Oprichter The New Fork - blockchain for food spreker bij Brands In Motion

 

Een van de sprekers is Marieke de Ruyter de Wildt (Wageningen UR), oprichter van The New Fork – blockchain for food. Marieke laat zien hoe claims over producten dankzij blockchain straks voor iedereen makkelijk controleerbaar worden. Die technologie waarmee tijdstip en inhoud van transacties zeer transparant en fraudebestendig worden vastgelegd, gaat grote gevolgen voor de rol van merken als bieders van garantie krijgen. Wat gaat de rol van blockchain voor de relatie tussen fabrikant, merk en consument worden?

 

One way or another blockchain, that distributed ledger technology we keep hearing and reading about, means greater traceability. And when it comes to agriculture, traceability allows us to learn about the origin and the characteristics of our food. Traceability is therefore not only seizing the day, but the future as well.

By the time our food gets to a local shopshelf, it has worked its way through what is arguably the largest and most complicated set of markets and middlemen that sit between the world’s producers and consumers, making traceability incredibly difficult.

While branding aims at signaling a product’s characteristics through images and ideas and simplifying the consumer’s experience and choice, it is not foolproof. Just think about the images of our four-legged friends frolicking in green fields, which are used to signal wholesome quality. Yet, the claims of brands are not always adequately controlled and adhered to, making it difficult for consumers to make informed choices.

Digital ledgers, like blockchain, can effectively remove the need for branding as they transmit reliable information about a product’s quality directly to customers. Put differently, farmers can become their own brand, obviating the need for a third party to do it for them. Moreover, consumers can directly verify the product quality of their shopping cart and make sure they get what they pay for. Making outsourced branding services unnecessary can profoundly reshape our food system by bringing the producers closer to the consumers. The benefits are clear – with less arbitrage for the middlemen, more value accrues to producers and consumers. This may sound fanciful, but it might just be the future of food.

The digitization of the food sector – the world’s largest market - will fundamentally reshape how we grow, sell, and eat food. How much longer will it take before you surf an online retailer in search of eggs, watch a webcam of your favorite farmer feeding his flock, and have those eggs appear on your doorstep the next morning?

Any opportunity to connect the world’s 570 million overwhelmingly poor producers with its 7.6 billion increasingly wealthy consumers must not be missed. Is blockchain the death blow to branding as we know it? What about the underdogs blockchain might create? How can they be supported in this transition?

 

Starbucks is to implement Microsoft’s recently announced Azure Blockchain Service to track coffee production.
The idea is to connect coffee drinkers with coffee farmers, who can potentially then take advantage of new financial opportunities. Customers will be able to use the Starbucks mobile app to trace the journey of their coffee from the farm where the beans originate all the way to their cup. Starbucks has promised to open source the pilot programme and share what it learns.