MasterCard, Alibaba back blockchain to track food, wine exports

MasterCard and Alibaba have joined with Blockchain Australia to establish a new platform for authenticating and tracking exports.

David Inderias, APAC Provenance Council (APC) co-founder.

Global cards giant MasterCard and Chinese internet behemoth Alibaba have joined with Blockchain Australia to establish a new platform for authenticating and tracking the nation’s food, wine and produce exports using blockchain technology.

Provided by a new industry group known as the APAC Provenance Council (APC), the platform is using blockchain to digitally track exports and is offering supply chain finance through MasterCard and Alipay — Alibaba’s payment system — to help farmers get paid earlier for their produce.

Products on the new automated supply chain are tracked using VeChain as the public blockchain and MasterCard Provenance as the permissioned ledger or transaction verification tool available to users of the platform.

While the platform will have a focus on the $76bn of exports from Australia to China, APC co-founder David Inderias said it could also help the nation diversify its food export markets in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the tensions in the Australia-China relationship.

“The overall theme of this is making more resilient export supply chains. One current complexity is COVID. The other is the economic and political trade circumstances, especially with China,’’ he said.

“Resilience for Australian producers means having the capability to cater to multiple markets. We have been very China-dependent, but maybe we should be more US-dependent, more Japan-dependent, more Indonesia-focused.”

Retiring Blockchain Australia chief executive Nicholas Giurietto said the federal government’s National Blockchain Roadmap released earlier this year identified agricultural supply chains as a key focus for blockchain and adjacent technologies.

“The formation of the APAC Provenance Council is a great step forward that will allow us to move forward with projects that will enhance the transparency, efficiency and management of agricultural and other supply chains,’’ he said.

Blockchain Australia, now to be run by Steve Vallas, is an industry body focused on building up confidence in blockchain and improving its image among local businesses and governments. The APC initiative is also being backed by the government’s Food Agility Co-operative Research Centre (CRC) established three years ago to help primary producers with innovation and technology.

Last week the Food Agility CRC secured the support of Coles, Kellogg’s, Mars, JBS, NAB and IAG and other businesses for a $10m food supply chain initiative to help the agribusiness industry reinvent its business models for the post-COVID-19 world. APC is part of that initiative.

“The big issue in the food industry right now is the supply chains. The situation with China is making people think about diversifying their market. The other is the data, showing the provenance of the product is really important in these sorts of markets,’’ said Food Agility chief executive Mike Briers.

“When you put a digital lens on a supply chain, it allows say a meat processor to provide information back to the farmer. That doesn’t happen universally at the moment. We want to work with technology partners and agribusiness partners to allow data to flow forward and back through the supply chain.”

Brand Tasmania CEO Todd Badiak said it was looking at using the APC platform because the Tasmanian economy was focused around small, unique businesses.

“When they export they have had problems with authenticity and fakes. We thought tying the provenance traceability platform to authenticity would be very important,’’ he said.

“What we want to do is build up that emotional connection between our producers and creators and our customers. It is a way for us to understand who our customers are and what is driving their decision-making, so the data aspect of this is really important.”

He said Brand Tasmania was talking to its partners in the fruit and vegetable, rock lobster and whisky distilling sectors about using the platform.

The core initial commercial vendors behind the APC are Brisbane-based Fresh Supply Co (run by Mr Inderias), CSIRO-backed digital fingerprinting company Laava and provenance authentication group Source Certain International.

FSC is an Australian start-up and creator of digital identities for food producers using blockchain.

FSC currently offers blockchain-verified trade financing of $80,000 a week in partnership with MasterCard for a major dairy exporter and is in the process of integrating one of the country’s largest seafood exporters.

Source Certain claims its technology platform can scientifically trace almost any food and non-food item back to its farm of origin and verify its authenticity.