Mumbai: Scan a code on your favorite Happy Banana – it will tell you a story. With a newly launched QR-code based solution FarmTrace™, you can easily track the complete journey of that fruit from the farm where it was picked to the ripening center where it was hygienically ripened until it reached your basket.
The tech solution aims to help consumers identify safe and healthy foods through the FarmTrace™ sticker with QR code, which can be scanned with any QR code scanning app. Especially during the current pandemic, it is important for consumers to be assured that a product has been treated in a hygienic and healthy manner. The innovative solution creates awareness about the produce customers buy, while also ensuring food safety through traceability and providing value-added benefits to farmers and produce suppliers.
Speaking about FarmTrace™, Dr. Pablo Erat, co-founder of Pioneering Ventures said: “the purpose of our company is to reshape the Indian food system to sustainably provide healthy food to people. We do this by modernizing each element of the value chain from farm to consumer.
Consumers in India and across the world are becoming increasingly conscious about the food they consume, and they prefer to know exactly where the product comes from, when it was harvested and how it was produced. With the solution that we already test-launched in February, the consumer can conveniently access all such purchase relevant information by simply scanning a QR code on the product sticker. In the pilot, we will implement the solution across our own product portfolio. After pilot completion, we will offer it to other sustainable producers of high-quality food with the vision to make it a standard within the quality food industry.”
The traceability solution, based on technology architecture that links MIS data already logged by food producers and suppliers, tracks each piece of fruit, vegetable or fresh produce packet based on a unique sticker. Scanning the sticker will let you know the location of the farm, the batch number, processing unit, packaging unit, shipping information as well as complete timeline of these steps.
Suniti Gupta, CEO Pioneering Ventures Tech, has been leading the development of the traceability solution together with business leaders at the company over the past two years. “The beauty of this solution lies in the simple yet elegant algorithms that enable us to track food and make this information easily available. FarmTrace™ is the only solution in India today that enables traceability on an individual fruit level. We are in process of integrating our systems with Blockchain technology now.”
How do the farmers and suppliers make their produce traceable through this technology? Suniti explains: “We have also deliberately kept it simple for farmers, supply chain partners and vendors to join in. They can make their food traceable without incurring a huge cost, by just enrolling with us. We provide ample tech support to the small-scale farmers to help enroll them and onboard them on this journey of being able to provide traceability features to their produce.” So far, over 3,000 farmers are already on the map of FarmTrace™. The web-based solution aims to enroll around 10,000 farmers in the pilot phase by March 2021.
Marco Klinge, CEO of Desai Fruits Venture, India’s largest banana producer and exporter, has successfully implemented FarmTrace™ to make its Happy Bananas traceable. “As a PV portfolio company, we could access and implement FarmTrace™ much earlier than others. It has been a few months since we started tagging our ‘Happy Bananas’ and the results are great. Consumers can now track our fruits from cultivation to market. While Happy Banana is already India’s leading premium banana brand, FarmTrace™ helps us to further differentiate our premium bananas from other suppliers and give our consumers full transparency and assurance about buying a healthy and hygienically produced product. In future, we are planning to add additional functionality to FarmTrace™ to engage more directly with our consumers.”
Marco adds that traceability-related tools such as FarmTrace™ can help producers and farmers realize better prices for their fresh produce. “Many farmers today are putting in a lot of work to improve the quality of their produce, such as growing food organically or following good agricultural practices to grow food more sustainably. As a trusted traceability brand, FarmTrace™ solution can help them to convey their value proposition directly to consumers, thereby differentiating their products and enabling them to command better prices for their produce without having to establish an own brand.”
