For eaters who follow dietary standard frameworks – such as halal or kosher – where their food came from matters. But how do they ensure that the food did not break those standards between its origin and when it ended up on in a store?
Fluree, the Winston-Salem secure data management company, has partnered with Malaysian supply chain company Sinisana Technologies for a blockchain-based app that traces halal food from origin to grocery-store shelves.
Sinisana is now using Fluree technology in its blockchain product, called Intersect. With Fluree’s technology, Sinisana provides transparency throughout the lifecycle of halal food products to the company’s supply chain and logistics customers. Halal is a set of standards prescribed by Islamic law, including prescriptions for the humane treatment of animals while living on a farm.
The beef-traceability app is one of the first in Southeast Asia to be powered by blockchain technology.
In its first operational use, Intersect will monitor a halal beef supply chain – beginning with Australian cattle, moving to a premium beef supplier in Sarawak, Malaysia, and ending in grocery stores.
“The meat supply chain and halal meat, in particular, is a complicated and highly regulated industry,” said Jonah Lau, co-founder and chief technology officer at Sinisana. “Leveraging Fluree’s graph-based blockchain technology, our solution provides a multi-organization collaborative platform to bring trust and transparency into the halal beef market.”
Benefits to all
For businesses to make better decisions, Sinisana’s Intersect platform offers real-time and integrated data. With Fluree’s blockchain technology, previously siloed data is connected, allowing interoperability among different data sets and supply-chain networks.
Business customers using Intersect can recall items to prevent counterfeit, prove ethical sourcing and forecast demand.
“Sinisana is a well-respected supply chain solution leader within Southeast Asia,” Brian Platz, Fluree’s CEO and co-founder, said. “The Sinisana team boasts decades of supply chain and logistics operations expertise within enterprise resource planning software, blockchain and data management technology.
“Fluree looks for that perfect mixture of industry domain expertise and technical innovation in its strategic partners.”
Partnering with the Winston-Salem blockchain company has proven benefits to Sinisana, which is headquartered in Kuching, Malaysia, and was founded in 2019.
“We’ve seen cost savings of more than 50% since using Fluree’s blockchain technology in January,” Lau said. “Development time has also been cut down significantly. We can have a blockchain-based ledger up and running in less than an hour using Fluree. Fluree’s ease of deployment and maintenance is a key factor in our decision to switch towards using Fluree.”
More than just beef
Halal beef is just one example to which Intersect, as powered by Fluree, can be applied. Other applications include pesticide and herbicide tracing, ingredient tracing, third-party lab integration, kosher certification, organic certification and multi-ingredient traceability.
For example, Sinisana has been using Fluree’s technology since March to trace soft shell crabs and shrimp.
This month, Sinisana also will launch a new project with Fluree to provide transparency into the provenance of ingredients and products from marginalized indigenous communities who live in Malaysian rainforests.
Sinisana will store payment information for those communities in immutable form with Fluree technology – a practice that will preserve biodiversity by eliminating the need to destroy rainforest habitats. This project will be conducted in collaboration with the Sarawak Biodiversity Centre and in compliance with the United Nations Development Programme’s Access and Benefits sharing program.
“When we talk about blockchain for supply chain networks, we often overlook the value the technology can potentially bring to the customer,” said Buck Flannigan, vice president of global alliances at Fluree. “Sinisana is proving that these emerging technologies can not only provide trust and transparency across business-to-business partners within a network, but also secure confidence and accountability for consumers that care about the sourcing and handling of goods.”
