Digital Sandwich: UK consortium leverages blockchain and AI technologies to enhance traceability

08 Dec 2020 --- With transparency crowned as the Top Trend for 2021 by Innova Market Insights, technologies that offer supply chain traceability are growingly visible. In this space, a consortium of UK companies under Digital Sandwich has snapped up £4 million (US$5.3 million) in funding to enhance the level of visibility in ingredient supply chains for commercial, pre-packaged sandwiches through an open platform.

The platform boosts confidence in the ready-made food supply chain. The Digital Sandwich consortium stresses that recent health and safety issues in the UK have started to undermine confidence in the production of ready-made foods, in addition to ongoing concerns about the conditions under which food is produced.

Indeed, securing high food safety standards is becoming a greater concern in the UK as the end of Brexit transition looms. Fears are currently escalating in Britain that the local market may be flooded with lower-quality imports, such as chlorinated chicken, in new trade deals with the rest of the world.

The platform can track the provenance of ingredients for a wide variety of sandwiches – from peanut butter and jelly to the Scandinavian “open” or even the classic tuna melt.Tracking provenance 
New capital from the UKRI Better Made in Britain scheme will allow small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to track the provenance of ingredients for a wide variety of sandwiches – from peanut butter and jelly to the Scandinavian “open” or even the classic tuna melt. 

“We recognize that supply chains are complex and most participants in the ready-made food sector are already using in-house systems and tools for managing supply chain visibility and optimization,” Scott Nelson, chairman and CEO at consortium member Sweetbridge EMEA, tells FoodIngredientsFirst.

“While the platform is designed for standalone deployment, there will be opportunity for integration with existing systems when practical and cost-effective.”

The UK sandwich industry is estimated by the consortium to be worth £5.6 billion (US$7.5 billion), employing over 300,000 people across the country. This market continues to grow at over 4 percent each year.

Tech-enhanced ingredient transparency
Internet of Things (IoT) company IMS Evolve is leading the development of the Virtual Industry System, which is the basis of the Digital Sandwich project. 

It is working alongside some of the UK’s largest manufacturers, food industry partners, technology providers, universities, trade and governmental organizations.

“The initial demonstrator is planned for a UK based application, although we are designing the platform to work globally,” an IMS Evolve spokesperson tells FoodIngredientsFirst.

“IMS’s Virtual Industry System can operate anywhere there is internet access – the better the access speed, the better the performance. The system is cloud-based and can be operated from smartphones and tablets as well as computers.”

The project extends the use of advanced IoT, blockchain and AI technologies to the ready-made food supply chain to ensure complete traceability of every ingredient in the supply chain – from primary production to retail. 

The principles established in developing this new platform are intended to be both scalable to the entire food industry and adaptable to include other industries with similar resourcing patterns.Securing high food safety standards is becoming a greater concern in the UK as the end of Brexit transition looms.

“The project will open up this new technology to SMEs in the food sector, bringing the benefits of securely sharing information up and down the supply chain to the largest single sector of companies (Food SMEs),” says Matt Raynor, chair of Raynor Foods, a UK sandwich supplier and Digital Sandwich project lead.

Virtualizing processes through a “digital fabric”
The goal of IMS’s Virtual Industry System is to provide a “digital fabric” that virtualizes processes within any type of enterprise.

“It is seen that any enterprise, be it a farmer with a smallholding or a multinational industry, would be treated in the same manner and offered the same level of functionality,” details the IMS Evolve spokesperson.

“The Virtual Industry concept is a complete solution to implementing a highly integrated enterprise-driven system,” they add.

Last September, Various agri-food stakeholders – including farmers, celebrity chefs and charities – came together to urge the UK government to bolster current protections and safeguards on food.

“The ability to use advanced technologies to irrefutably track ingredients in food, from primary production to retail, will be integral to maintaining public trust in the food system and reducing waste,” states Digital Sandwich.

It further highlights that its platform also offers the potential to extend data sharing to collect consumer behavioral data through, for instance, integration with health and diet apps. In doing so, it may help improve the improving diet and health of consumers.

“This technology is designed to be open to organizations of all sizes across the supply chain, right down to the smallest producer,” remarks Ed Porter, director of IoT solutions at IMS Evolve.

“That means that anyone can benefit from the increased productivity, food quality and safety and reduction in waste that this project promises to deliver.”

Transparency Triumphs
FoodIngredientsFirst continues to showcase a proliferating swathe of technologies that aid in boosting product traceability, as consumers increasingly call for. 

Within the “Transparency Triumphs” trend, Innova Market Insights highlights that brands are adopting and pairing new packaging technologies such as invisible barcodes and near-field communication technology with creative, meaningful storytelling will be successful. 

Over the last year, this has included blockchain-enabled livestock tracking, “bean-to-bar” cocoa tracking, anti-deforestation geospatial surveillance and radar-based monitoring systems.

By Benjamin Ferrer