10/08/2022
HNI Protocol: Solving Food supply problems through Blockchain.
Food is not just a commodity. It is essential to human lives and cannot be treated like other manufactured products. From the farmers' growing stage to harvesting, processing, packaging, and supplying, none of these stages can be underestimated or neglected.
Nowadays, foods are more insecure and unhealthy than we could imagine. And this is because there are many problems associated with these stages of food production mentioned above. Food supply has witnessed lots of challenges over the years. The significant difficulties affecting food supply are food duplication and food fraud. Not only do these challenges damage consumers' faith in their food, but they can also result in fatal consequences from consumption. During the 2009 salmonella peanut butter outbreak, 9 Americans died, and 714 got ill.
According to the World Health Organization, it's estimated that almost 1 in 10 people become ill every year from consuming contaminated food. What is more alarming is that the food supply chain has grown so complicated that it's almost impossible for food producers to guarantee the source of their products. This article will identify the main issues the global food supply chain faces: food duplication and food fraud, and how the HNI protocol has solved them through Blockchain.
Problems of the Food Supply Chain: Food Duplication and Food Fraud
What is Food duplication?
Food duplication is the illegal production of a consumable product without legal verification to authenticate safety for consumption. An unverified producer produces foods or consumable products illegally to make money causing damage to human lives.
Food duplication decreases the complex and nutritional composition of foods to produce less costly and counterfeit food products. Primarily, the product's overall image, including its shape, colour combination, graphics, or even its texture and other features, falls under the branding of such a product. On that premise, food duplication refers to the production of inferior food products sold in a brand similar to the original product.
Of all these, the trade of duplicate food products in the food and beverage industry is massive, booming, and likely the most damaging from a health and safety perspective. For instance, in July 2021, a factory manufacturing counterfeits of the well-known TATA Salt was taken down by the Delhi police. The manufacturing unit set up in Barwala was primarily involved in the bulk production of inferior quality salt, packed in duplicate TATA Salt packaging.
In India, the Food Regulator (FSSAI) analyzes a total of 106,459 samples all over the country and discovers that over 15.8 per cent of food samples as sub-standard, 3.7 per cent unsafe. At the same time, 9 per cent were mislabeled during the year 2018-19.
What is Food fraud?
Food fraud refers to a situation where customers are deceived about the quality and content of the food they are purchasing. It is often motivated by an undue advantage for those who sell the food.
Food fraud has a disastrous and destructive impact on consumers, food suppliers, and everyone involved. It can result in a huge health risk if unidentified allergens or hazardous materials are added to food products unconsciously.
Food duplication shouldn't be confused with food fraud. Species and Milk are the best examples of food fraud. Fruits, vegetables, fish, and similar products are coloured to make them look attractive and fresh to entice buyers.
According to the United States Grocery Manufacturers Association, food fraud affects approximately 10 per cent of all commercially sold food products and costs the global food industry between $10 billion and $15 billion annually.
These two food supply challenges are rampant and proven uncontrollable by food regulation officials. The main cause of these problems is the inefficient food supply chain, i.e., most original food products aren't accessible to some geolocations making unverified producers take advantage to produce a duplicate and counterfeit food products.
The need for an efficient food supply chain is paramount to solve these problems and decrease and eliminate duplicate food products and food frauds. How can we develop an efficient and sufficient food supply chain?
BLOCKCHAIN AND THE FOOD INDUSTRY
Blockchain is regarded as the next uprising trend in the technology world. Presently, several applications, business sectors, and processes are building their systems on Blockchain technology. This is because of the efficiency of Blockchain in secure handling, storing administrative records, and digital authentication to strengthen intellectual property rights and patent systems.
Blockchain technology will effectively help improve the traceability and transparency of food supply chains and can assist in providing an unchangeable record from the production stage to the retail store of a product. As such, it could efficiently prevent operators in the middle of the supply chain from food duplicates and food fraud. Such as changing the description of food products by mislabelling them.
Blockchain will ensure the traceability of every food producer back to the original producers. The need for authenticity and verification of different food products can be done through Blockchain.
HNI Protocol- A Decentralized Ecosystem for Food Supply Chain
HNI is a decentralized new-generation protocol that enables anybody to connect to the world of Defi anywhere in the world. Not only is HNI ultra-fast and low-cost, but it is also censorship resistant- which means the network will remain open for applications to run freely, and transactions will never be stopped.
HNI ECO is a fully open-source decentralized, powerful, fast, and reliable platform that will help improve food supply through Blockchain. Everyone wants to know more about the food product they purchase—its source, how it's processed, and the journey it takes to reach them. HNI plans to make all these easier for shoppers.
As an agribusiness platform, HNI is dedicated to creating traceability tools that are built for the reality of today's food system and those who run it. It will also continue its mission to liberate food data and provide consumers, organisations, and the entire public with the tools necessary to co-create an efficient, reliable, sustainable, and safe global food system.
Solutions HNI is bringing to the Food Supply Chain.
The main aim of the HNI Protocol is to provide solutions to problems in the food industry using Blockchain technology. HNI offers solutions to issues of food duplication and food fraud through the following processes:
1. Secure, store, and authentication of product information.
By leveraging blockchain-secured storage features, HNI will give consumers the ability to store their food product's information in its network. HNI network will help verify the claims made for each product through some standards before the data is stored on its network. Food products can easily be accessed and analyzed with the information available on the network. Also, consumers will be able to view and verify the authenticity of each product, thus preventing counterfeit and duplicate food.
2. Enhanced Trackability
HNI aims to track food production from "farm to fork" by creating a digital certification system through blockchain technology. With this, immutable records, information on food conditions, and their passage route throughout the supply chain are given to consumers. In other words, people will be able to know who processes it, how it is processed, how it is being transported, and its physical condition before they purchase it.
HNI also plans to tokenize products to enable them to be traceable back to their origin. Hence, any inefficiency and problem source in the process can be tracked and corrected. This will significantly help to prevent food duplication and enhance food safety and security.
3. Optimization of supply chain
The HNI protocol will enable seamless management of all operations through smart contract solutions. In the food industry, most of the functions in the supply chain are done manually. With smart contracts, HNI will automate and coordinate the process, thus making it faster and more efficient, which in return, will reduce the use of chemicals to preserve food and also reduce food wastage and spoilage.
4. Undiminished Transparency
As we know, transparency builds trust. Smart contracts and other specialized blockchain development tools allow transparency in the food supply chain. With these tools, each product has its unique identifier when inputted into the network. All information about the food item is provided to the consumer, the source, and storage conditions.
5. HNI marketplace
Part of the HNI protocol roadmap is to provide a decentralized marketplace where consumers are connected directly with producers. Thus, all intermediate parties in the system are eliminated and bring food products to the user directly from the farmers/ producers at a meagre cost. The HNI marketplace will also help reduce the channel in which products will pass, thus avoiding the risk of food contamination and food duplicates.
Conclusion
The solution HNI Protocol is bringing will independently digitize, standardize, audit, track and trace, measure, and monetize food data for the immediate benefit and huge profit gain of your business.
HNI will undoubtedly give consumers 100% confidence to purchase food products. It will give shoppers rebuilding confidence in the food supply chain through transparency, and everyone will be 100% confident in the end-to-end network of systems that produce the world's food.
For more info, Visit our Website:
HNI is a decentralized new-generation protocol that allows anybody, wherever, to connect to the world of DeFi. HNI ECO is a fully open source decentralized.
