FDBusiness.com

Avery Dennison RBIS, a division of Avery Dennison Corporation, the Fortune 500® innovative packaging company, has announced a transformative initiative with partner Beefchain. In partnership with the Wyoming Business Council, Beefchain helps ranchers command more value from their beef by proving, via blockchain technology, that their beef is free-range and fairly farmed, distinguishing themselves from commodity beef products.

Avery Dennison is helping enhance Beefchain initiatives by enabling them to go beyond the RFID-tagging of cattle, to RFID-tagging the resultant beef cases which will be tracked and traced along the supply chain to consumption. This means consumers, restaurants, distributors, and retailers, can track their steak from farm to restaurant.

These beef cases carry a unique digital identifier that will trace each individual case from farm-to-table and will be traced along the way at the point of plant processing, export, import, and finally to delivery. These unique identifiers or EPC’s will be hashed into Beefchain’s Ethereum network based blockchain, an immutable ledger that will house all collected data and serve as a single source of truth for the entire global transaction.

Starting at a beef processing facility in Wyoming, the innovative pilot tagged cases of beef with RFID integrated labels and sent them to a five-star dining establishment in Taipei, Taiwan. Customers were then able to scan a QR code and access to additional provenance  information showing the food’s journey of 7,500 miles, adding to the overall dining experience. RFID and Blockchain technology is used to assure customers that the beef is sourced and trusted to be from Wyoming, known for high standards of farming, leading to some of the best quality beef in the United States.

This new initiative cements Avery Dennison as a market leader in food intelligent solutions and supply chain technology. RFID devices can be registered and permissioned into a blockchain, adding another layer of trust into the overall ecosystem. With increased digital demands along the supply chain, RFID can help automate digital data capture into blockchains, whether private or public.

This pioneering farm-to-table project, the first of its kind across the USA, helps create a new authenticity and traceability across the food industry where blanket bans on problematic products can lead to $90 billion losses per year.

Vice President and General manager of Avery Dennison RFID, Francisco Melo says: “RFID is setting the foundations for Blockchain integration in the food industry. Enabling farmers and businesses to guarantee the provenance of a product will mean greater improvements for food safety, product differentiation and enhanced consumer experience. Avery Dennison is committed to leading innovative technologies that will change the future of how we shop and consume.”