Cardano Foundation develops metadata connector for Scantrust supply chain tracking

Cardano Foundation develops metadata connector for Scantrust supply chain tracking

Cardano Foundation, Scantrust, Baia's Wine

In January 2020, during the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Cardano Foundation accepted an offer to implement a proof of concept integration with Scantrust—a global connected goods platform.

Throughout 2020, the Cardano Foundation’s Integrations Team has been working with Scantrust to develop a transactional metadata connector, which would use the Cardano blockchain as a public audit platform on which to verify supply chain data linked with physical products.

Here, we are pleased to share further details of this project with our community, as well as exploring the first proof of concept product to formally leverage transactional metadata on Cardano for supply chain tracking through Scantrust.

Before we discover how Cardano metadata can be used for product traceability, let’s take a closer look at Scantrust and how it provides supply chain solutions.

What is Scantrust?

Based in Lausanne, Switzerland, Scantrust provides digitalization and supply chain tracking to Fortune 500 enterprises and small to medium enterprises (SMEs) in more than 165 countries worldwide.

Working alongside companies with complex international supply chains such as Unilever, ExxonMobil and DuPont, Scantrust applies proprietary and patented tamper-resistant labels on connected products, using secured QR-codes. These QR-codes include a secure graphic in the center, that gives every QR-code anti-counterfeit features.

Consumers can scan these codes using their smartphones to easily access product-specific information. Scantrust’s software then traces and displays unique item information, such as origin, time in transit, and which actors have been involved in the supply chain journey.

For companies that depend on selling physical products, Scantrust enables active brand protection, supply chain awareness, and direct consumer engagement benefits. So, why is supply chain visibility important to companies selling physical products, and what problems does the physical goods supply chain currently face?

Why is supply chain visibility important?

The International Chamber of Commerce expects the global cost of counterfeit goods and piracy to reach US$4.2trn by 2022. The most frequent counterfeiting cases include passing off fake goods as a reputable brand name or falsifying certification data such as geographic origin or organic status.

Family-owned artisanal businesses—crucial to the local economy in developing nations—are among those most deeply affected by this. Not only can it adversely affect their company’s reputation, but it can also dilute the market for their specialty goods.

Instead, through a functional and low-cost supply chain traceability solution, small and medium producers could prove the origin of their products, while also maintaining a fair market price as a genuine producer. An effective supply chain tracking solution, for instance on a blockchain, would also offer greater engagement touchpoints with the end consumer.

However, existing supply chain tracking solutions have typically been difficult to implement, easy to falsify, or expensive to maintain. Now, Scantrust’s enterprise-ready solution—the first of its kind to integrate with Cardano—is placing control back into the hands of SMEs, the foundation of developing nations’ economies.

Powered by the Cardano Foundation’s transactional metadata connector, Scantrust is collaborating with artisan wine producer Baia’s Wine. We discover below how Baia’s Wine is using this solution to bring transparency to their supply chain.

Baia’s Wine—A powerful proof of concept

Spanning three generations of expert winemakers, Baia’s Wine is nestled in the rolling hills of the Lesser Caucasus in the Imereti Region of Western Georgia, at an elevation of over 300 meters (984 feet) above sea level.

Producing award-winning and fully organic wines, the female-led vineyard is run by two sisters, Baia Abuladze and Gvanca Abuladze, together with their younger brother Giorgi. The elder sister, Baia, is a recipient of Forbes 30 under 30 Europe, and the family continues an 8,000-year-old Georgian winemaking tradition.

In addition to their Georgian customers, Baia’s Wine exports its organic wine to 12 international markets—and managing this large supply chain is a difficult and manually intensive process.

Through Scantrust, each bottle of wine produced by Baia’s Wine will carry a unique QR-identifier connected to metadata on the Cardano blockchain, allowing every bottle to be easily traced from the grape to the table. The proof of concept solution will allow for detailed data visualization built from every touchpoint along Baia’s Wine supply chain journey.

Baia’s Wine is a perfect pilot project for future product traceability solutions built using Cardano, with specialization in the fast-moving consumer goods sector—but this solution has the potential to be applied to a multitude of other industries.

In the future, a diverse set of products, including industrial supplies, can be given a Cardano on-chain digital identity for enhanced lifecycle management. The solution’s full implementation will be operational in early 2021.


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This is Awesome :+1:

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I love to see that. :heart:

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Why do we need a public blockchain for that?

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Great to see this project come to fruition. Thanks to @JeremyFirster, Mel McCann & team. Keep it up! :tada:

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Wonderful work! So by early 2021 will this be open for anyone to start creating traceability for their product?

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A public blockchain offers decentralized consensus. Because no single entity can change the ledger information the consumer can be assured the tracing and product are legitimate.

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Great use case :heart:

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For example: they don’t need to setup their own infrastructure. So why not?

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This has many advantages, some of which have already been mentioned here.

Another one is certainly that even after the manufacturer is no longer available (or he does no longer support this kind of product), this functionality still works for existing (sold) products.

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Couldn’t help but just smile reading this. Great work!

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Thanks, looking forward to future updates. Any information on how the qr codes work? What’s stopping counterfeiters to just copy those codes and put them on the fake product?

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This is the public source of truth. As infrastructure, anyone who has a need can easily check the supply chain data to not only validate that the product is real, but the supply chain components itself.

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@Klobbinger, one of the most important features for ScanTrust is the tamper-proof QR codes that all have a unique identifier attached. This is their patented technology which prevents someone from trying to copy and print these codes for another bottle. It would show up in their system as an unreadable or invalid product - which helps to prevent. All product information is also stored on Cardano to make this an end-to-end tamper proof system.

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Yeah but how? Also, if only they can confirm that the label is legit wit their patended tech, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of the public blockchain?

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Scantrust makes the label which can be read by anyone but can’t be copied. The provenance and movement information associated with the labeled item is uploaded to the blockchain which can be checked by anyone to view the products history.

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Thank you! Yes the product will be available during 1Q2021

If you are considering something similar for your product please let me know and I would be happy to go into further details as to how things work. There will be more updates and a technical deep dive once the product is live.

We went into more details during the Cardano monthly update show which explains how using Cardano creates an end-to-end tamper proof system.
Past data collection, there is also verification and public transparency. These two solutions are made possible by using a public blockchain. We added a few additional features for more attribution, and I think you will be very happy with the end result.

To discuss this further now, we made it to where everyone can see the actually data included in the metadata transaction. So you no longer need to just trust Scantrust (or a specific company) to say the data is real and the product is real.

For your original point, adding this information to a public blockchain ensures that the product attached to the QR code is real - mitigating the risks for counterfeit goods.

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For more information on transactional metadata - click here

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Interesting, I think I get how the copy protection works but how is it possible that you cannot recreate the qr code based on the read data?

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