Leveraging blockchain tech to enhance halal beef verification and traceability

18 Aug 2022 --- Halal food verification will be boosted through a forthcoming online platform, Intersect, designed to improve halal food product sourcing, provenance and safety.

Malaysia-headquartered supply chain company Fluree and supply management platform Sinisana Technologies are involved in the partnership.

The blockchain-enabled platform is designed to boost supply chain and logistics customers’ transparency and integrity throughout the full lifecycle of halal food products from their respective origins to grocery store shelves. It involves real-time and integrated data to help businesses with supply chain decision making.

“Sinisana is a well-respected supply chain solution leader within Southeast Asia,” says Brian Platz, Fluree co-founder and CEO. “Sinisana’s Intersect solution specifically will monitor a halal beef supply chain originating with Australian cattle – its first operational use case.”

“Fluree technology will help track those cattle’s initial transit from a premium beef supplier in Sarawak, Malaysia, to grocery stores. Sinisana’s halal beef traceability app is one of the first to be powered by blockchain technology in Southeast Asia.”

Fluree’s blockchain technology connects previously siloed data, allowing interoperability among different data sets and supply chain networks.Streamlined halal sourcing
Halal is a set of standards that adhere to dietary restrictions prescribed by Islamic law, including the humane treatment of animals while living on a farm and not cooking with alcohol.

“We’ve seen cost savings of more than 50% since using Fluree’s blockchain technology in January,” comments Jonah Lau, Sinisana co-founder and chief technology officer. “Development time has also been cut down significantly. We can have a blockchain-based ledger up and running in less than an hour using Fluree.” 

“Fluree’s ease of deployment and maintenance is a key factor in our decision to switch toward using Fluree technologies,” he notes. “The meat supply chain and halal meat, in particular, is a complicated and highly-regulated industry.”

“Leveraging Fluree’s graph-based blockchain technology, our solution provides a multi-organization collaborative platform to bring trust and transparency into the halal beef market.”

Fluree’s blockchain technology connects previously siloed data, allowing interoperability among different data sets and supply chain networks. “Business customers using Intersect may effectively recall items, prevent counterfeiting, prove ethical sourcing and forecast demand,” details the company.

Spanning a myriad of sectors
The halal use case is merely one in which Intersect, powered by Fluree, may be applied. Others include pesticide and herbicide tracing, ingredient tracing, third-party lab integration, kosher certification, organic certification and multi-ingredient traceability. 

Sinisana has been using Fluree technology since March for the traceability of soft shell crabs and shrimp. The company further planst to launch a new project using Fluree technology in August, that will provide transparency into the provenance of ingredients and products from marginalized indigenous communities who live in Malaysian rainforests. 

Sinisana will store payment information to those communities in “immutable form” using Fluree technology, in a bid to preserve biodiversity by eliminating the need to destroy rainforest habitats. 

The project will be conducted in collaboration with the Sarawak Biodiversity Centre as part of its commitment to and compliance with the United Nations Development Programme’s Access and Benefits Sharing Program.

“When we talk about blockchain for supply chain networks, we often overlook the value the technology can potentially bring to the consumer,” says Buck Flannigan, Fluree vice president of global alliances.

“Sinisana is proving that these emerging technologies can not only provide trust and transparency across business-to-business partners within a network, but also secure confidence and accountability for consumers that care about the sourcing and handling of goods.”

Big moves in blockchain
Increasingly, food businesses at every scale are banking on blockchain. Earlier this month, researchers at Finland’s Aalto University developed and tested a pilot app to help consumers evaluate their shopping choices and offer new insights about the impact of certain foods. 

The Parmigiano Reggiano Consortium (Consorzio del Parmigiano Reggiano) recently teamed up with Dutch cheese mark designer Kaasmerk Matec and digital tracking developer p-Chip Corporation to embed blockchain-enabled trackable silicon microchips – the size of a grain of salt – directly into a food-safe parmesan casein label placed on cheese wheels. 

In other moves, PepsiCo is trialing technology from Security Matters – an invisible “marker” system enabling both physical and digital tracking to identify, track, and sort packaging waste, which is logged onto a blockchain system.

Edited by Benjamin Ferrer