In the post-COVID era, an overwhelming majority of consumers are conscious about where their food is coming from. Companies are also growing much more conscious about their own sourcing, and this is not easy to achieve unless they have a connected supply chain. Traditionally, the age-old supply chains have leveraged paper-based, and disjointed data systems. Without transparency and traceability in place, supply chains suffer from errors, disruptions and increased costs.
Enter Blockchain and TraceX Technologies!
By leveraging blockchain, TraceX Technologies, co-founded by Srivatsa Sreenivasarao and Anil Nadig, are able to enable and provide transparent, and traceable agrifood supply chains. In starting TraceX technologies, the focus for Srivatsa and Anil centered around the challenges associated with traceability, and enabling connected supply chains.
Blockchain provides a clear, unified view of the data throughout the supply chain – from the farm to the fork. This drives operational efficiencies, enables better tracing, provides better data-driven insights, amongst others – all of which then contributes to overall productivity and profitability.
As a blockchain-enabled proprietary platform, TraceX Technologies is able to provide end- to-end traceability for its participants. The founders have focused on creating a network for food and agri supply chain participants to come onto the platform and share the supply chain data democratically with everyone. This, in turn, extends the boundaries of their own supply chains, ending silos.
As per Srivatsa, “With the distributed ledger technology, all the participants come together exchange data on the same network, single version of the truth available, so it builds more credibility. Credibility increases with more participants, right with more network participants and players coming together. It’s not going to be there on day one, but it’s a journey that we started three years ago and now we’ve seen significant growth and opportunity for us to scale further.”
The TraceX technology needs are quite significant, multi-lingual and, very data intensive. Amazon Web Services (AWS) plays a very critical enabling role in the TraceX journey, by providing a secure, scalable, powerful, and very easy to deploy infrastructure. TraceX Technologies has leveraged different components of AWS, including, for instance, running their multi-node, Blockchain-node on a Kubernetes Cluster, to Amazon S3 services, AWS Lambda services with Amazon API gateway, or Fargate servers. TraceX is also an AWS Startup Ramp member, an acceleration program by AWS for startups that are building innovative solutions for public sector customers worldwide, including but not limited to customers in national and local government, space and defense, and healthcare.
Over the past three years, TraceX Technologies has been able to work with an array of stakeholders and enterprises, including D2C brands, contract farming organizations, and, export organizations, amongst others.
In Andhra Pradesh, TraceX Technologies has partnered with TechnoServe, an international non-profit firm. Together, they offer end-to-end digital traceability for coffee produced by
farmers in Araku Valley, Andhra Pradesh. Thanks to TraceX platform, the entire journey of coffee can be tracked and recorded across each and every stage of the production process, from bean to cup.
In Telangana, TraceX is deploying its platform for seed traceability across the state. This translates to every bag of paddy, rice and cotton, having traceability built right into it. This gives the confidence to the farmer at the grassroot level on the seed quality.
In Odisha, a diary foods company, Milk Mantra, is leveraging the TraceX platform to capture the digital journey of the milk as it moves through the dairy value chain in real-time. By integrating Blockchain into their dairy processing operations, Milk Mantra is able to achieve full traceability—starting at their various collection points.
TraceX is now extending their expertise to cover meat, livestock and eggs. They are working with an array of enterprises on enabling blockchain-enabled trust and verification across the supply chain.
In Karnataka, MTR Foods is leveraging TraceX’s Blockchain traceability solutions to trace the Byadgi Chilly used in their products.
In Kerala, the Vegetable and Fruit Promotion Council of Kerala (VFPCK) worked with TraceX technologies to digitize the complete export journey from India to UK, for their product Nendran bananas and comply with the regulatory standards in UK.
As it scales further, TraceX Technologies seeks to build on its recent momentum, by leveraging ecosystem partnerships, and bringing more trust and reliability into the supply chains.
As Head – Industry Intelligence Group at CMR, Prabhu Ram advises industry participants on the dynamic technology market in India and other Asian geographies through proprietary and custom technology research, cutting across technology domains. Prabhu oversees an analyst team that tracks smartphones, data cards, tablets, storage, display, wearables and smart homes.
