Consumers, retailers and the food service industry are increasingly demanding insights about how food gets from farm to fork and sustainability practices, which is growing the need for traceability across the entire agrifood supply chain.

Traceability is the ability to collect and link datapoints along the journey of a product, through all stages of production, from the point of origin to when it gets to the consumer.

Trust Provenance are experts in this space, having developed fast and effective agricultural product traceability and sustainability software that tracks and documents the journey of food products.

Since 2017, Trust Provenance has worked right across the agricultural sector, from red meat, to seafood and grains, to horticulture.

Andrew Grant co-founded the company after identifying a gap in the market, with a lack of information around quality and standards.

“In 2016, my business partner and I founded another business called MEQ Probe (Meat Eating Quality Probe) that provides objective meat eating quality data at the carcass and live animal level,” he said.

“It was through that journey we identified gaps in the supply chain around information for quality standards and other data points of Australian produced products, and we thought these should be showcased and leveraged by Australian growers, producers and processors. That’s why Trust Provenance was set-up.”

Trust Provenance attracted almost instant interest from the horticulture sector and started working with producers and a supermarket group.

“That’s where issues around things like data standards, data privacy, data permissions, data sharing of information, third party system interoperability, and accessibility to that information in a real-time fashion, started to raise their head in the industry,” Andrew said.

“Traceability was off to a good start, but there were issues that needed resolving before the real value could be created.”

Andrew said the current challenge was ensuring industry could scale and implement the right standards, protocols and infrastructure to allow traceability usage to grow across all aspects of the agribusiness supply chain.

“You may have a piece of farm management software that has been built for a specific farm, and the industry is quickly learning that the solution doesn’t actually allow for the easy transfer of data and information between stakeholders in the supply chain,” he explained.

“Producers don’t want ‘another piece of software’, they want an integrated platform that works across the supply chain for easy exchanging of information between parties. They also don’t want one centralised ‘they own it all’ platform, as producers often have reduced power when they are price takers”.

That’s where the Agtech and Logistics Hub comes in.

The Hub can connect businesses such as Trust Provenance, to farmers and agribusinesses, facilitating conversations that can ultimately improve their tech and adoption through real-world insights.

The company recently participated in the Hub’s OpenGround program, aimed at enhancing transparency and accountability to animal welfare and biosecurity in livestock transport. Run in conjunction with Meat & Livestock Australia, the program sought to discover traceability solutions with a focus on data generating and business models that benefitted all supply chain partners.

Andrew said the program was of great benefit, as it brought together a range of stakeholders from across Queensland, including producers, saleyards, feed-lotters, processors, transporters and government.

“It sounds quite logical to talk to the customers and stakeholders and ask what they want and how they want it, but that doesn’t always happen,” he said.

“I like the Agtech and Logistics Hub’s approach to bring together solution providers and key stakeholders in the supply chain, while keeping a real focus on industry and outcome.”

Andrew expects traceability to become more integral to Australian agriculture in the next few years as demand for real-time data around food provenance and sustainability practices grows.

And he believes there will be a time where traceability will be required across the entire supply chain.

“There will become a point where retailers across the globe will say, ‘if you can’t provide me with this level of information then I will not buy your product’ whether it’s red meat, bananas or a loaf of bread.

“I often say to farmers, you need to think about what is the end consumer and buyer wanting and why, and how can I provide that information along with my world class product, in a format they trust and they can embrace, to keep driving demand for Australian produce.

“The focus should always be on market access. Whether it’s maintaining, growing, enabling or educating to gain market access, all growers are marketers, whether they like it or not.

“Producers and the market need to be aware that we aren’t the only ones doing this. Every day I see another deal, news article, program, funding and initiatives, coming out of our global competitors’ markets, and I can’t help but think we aren’t moving fast enough. “Our farmers, products, systems and infrastructure are world class, so there is nothing to be afraid of.

“Once the agriculture sector digitises, and platforms are aligned with industry and supported in a scalable way that we can back our sustainability and provenance claims, we can put ourselves (Australian agriculture) in front of the pack, to reap the rewards and future-proof our industry.”