The Challenge

The meat supply chain is a very complex system involving multiple agents: livestock farms, feedlots, transporters, feed suppliers, veterinarians, slaughterhouses, retailers, consumers, etc. Events occurring at any agent in the chain have huge effects on the industry, on consumers, who demand more information, and on other stakeholders such as public bodies.

Nowadays, existing ICT, data and traceability systems collect some data, normally entered manually, from every segment of the supply chain, mainly to assure food safety for consumers. However, the potential for data sharing along the supply chain, upstream and downstream, is much bigger than that. Shared value systems based on data integration and sharing would allow every segment of the supply chain to improve production efficiency, to make better decisions, to be better informed about product quality, and so on.

Cloud data integration services powered by manual inputs but also by IoT devices, are an excellent opportunity to generate and share objective data from every segment of the supply chain. Currently, some farmers, industries, etc. are digitising their businesses, but there is no data interchange. Mostly, data lacks interoperability, reusability, openness, etc.

The Solution

The objective of the project is to develop a data service platform allowing the connection of all agents in the agri-food chain of meat products. Currently, all these agents work in complete isolation and only exchange information required by law. What we propose in this project is to connect all these agents through a platform permitting the optimisation of processes and costs while offering higher value-added services. Thanks to this platform, automation will be established along the meat supply chain with the consequent economic savings, e.g.: if the platform detects that an animal requires health services in advance, the service provided by the veterinarian will be more efficient and economical. All these automations are based on the information collected by the agents’ ICT systems, IoT devices and open data sources, which are analysed by AI algorithms to generate recommendations.

In addition to these automations which increase productivity, the platform offers an improved traceability service based on blockchain that can be offered to consumers (final consumers, supermarkets, and industry) of meat products and to supervisory agents of the processes (public administrations). This improved traceability service will offer much more information (which is a trend on the part of society) than is legally required. This information can also include livestock practises, environmental, etc., based on data. The traceability service is based on the information generated by the agents of the system that is stored in a Blockchain structure available in the data provider service, which is accessible through different dashboards-apps developed.

Business projections – scalability

• Creation of a B2B sales network that will use free demonstrators and starter packages to engage retailers and public bodies.
• Data generating agents will receive the AI services of the platform free of charge in exchange for their data.
• Process data from +1000 kg of meat product.
• +20 industry players.
• Estimated revenue in excess of 100k.
• Estimated growth 25%.