DIGItal Twins of food pRoducts UnleaShing TransparencY

Project Information

DIGI-TRUSTY

Grant agreement ID: 190154354

DOI

10.3030/190154354

Project closed

EC signature date 4 August 2023

Start date 1 August 2023

End date 31 July 2025

Funded under

• The European Innovation Council (EIC)

Total cost

€ 3 594 506,25

EU contribution

€ 2 500 000,00

Coordinated by

CONNECTING FOOD
France

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - DIGI-TRUSTY (DIGItal Twins of food pRoducts UnleaShing TransparencY)

Reporting period: 2024-08-01 to 2025-07-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The aim of the project is to provide technology solutions which enable industries sourcing from agriculture to respond to worldwide challenges in supply chains, impacting people, animals and the environment. In particular the project aims to deal with:
• food safety, fraud and waste reduction
• supply chain resilience, sustainable practices at farm-level and the respect of human rights and animal well-being.
This is particularly important in light of recent EU regulation requiring supply chain due diligence and reporting such as the CSRD directive, the circular economy directive, deforestation regulation, human rights and the climate protection act.
To respond to these challenges, the agrifood industry needs to become data-driven and use new technology solutions capable of assessing, managing and modelling supply chains.
The 2 founders are particularly motivated to build a European Deeptech technology solution working with the vast amounts of data available in worldwide supply chains, as they are conscious of the importance for European agrifood sovereignty that data remains in Europe. They recognize that connecting the actors is the pathway to making supply chains transparent, resilient and sustainable. The prior necessity is the capacity to collect, normalize, centralize and validate data from actors and make it exploitable for all industry players, notably linking information from the farm and processing levels to end products at batch-level. The founders are competent to address this as they lived the challenges while working over 20 years each in the agrifood industry both in consumer food groups (Mars, Nestlé, Andros, Danone, Sara Lee) providing finished products to the market and also in upstream groups supplying the raw materials and ingredients (Avril / Sofiproteol).
The project is to build a data-driven intelligent supply chain management platform for agrifood actors, centralising precise, comprehensive data and providing modules to increase visibility and precision in supply chain activities and audit the compliance of products.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

To build a data-driven intelligent supply chain management platform centralising comprehensive data and increasing visibility and compliance, the project has focused on the 3 main capabilities required:
• Automated data gathering and standardization to the EPCIS-GS1 industry norm, enabling actors to share their data and protect ownership and confidentiality
• Traceability and product monitoring from rank 1 suppliers right up the supply chain to rank N (origin)
• Digital audits and assessment of supplier capabilities and practices, configurable to different criteria, such as safety, environment or social issues.
3 underlying technologies and protocols have been developed and used to achieve this:
• Intelligent algorithms to recognize errors in the data standardization process, also in a configurable rules-engine for digital audits
• Digital twins to centralise multidimensional data from farms (practices, certifications, location) and production (quality controls) and link it to end products, effectively tracing products and ingredients back to the farm
• Blockchain as a trust machine for data sharing with control of consent, ownership and confidentiality.
We met some obstacles in data integration which we overcame in order to adapt to complex agrifood industry supply chains, for example the function to structure the data despite missing data which is to be completed later, eg. information coming from another part of the supply chain.
We also overcame rigidity in the protocols used, to make integration and notarization more flexible and reflect market complexities in certain cases:
• Provide flexibility in the Digital Twin protocol to allow corrections at the atomic/transaction/event level to no longer have to resubmit all the data if there is only one box that was incorrect.
• Asynchronism of blockchain notarization, the latter is no longer done automatically after the generation of traceability, but on request.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Connecting Food now has several strategic accounts as customers, such as retailers and cooperatives, who are using the platform to assess the risks of their supplier base of around 15,000 actors each. This has significantly advanced the network effect of connecting data from actors along the supply chain, between farms, processors and retailers. The platform is ready to deal with this scale of data. The more upstream actors and suppliers are on-board, the higher the attractivity of the platform for other strategic accounts, notably retailers and brands. Hence the positive network effect that Connecting Food is now experiencing.
To be able to complete the project over the next 12 months of the EIC Accelerator and capitalize on this positive network effect, Connecting Food wants to leverage the equity side of the blended finance and is actively seeking private investors to complete a fund-round to ensure the roll-out of the go-to-market strategy and further monetise the platform.

Use Case Digital Twin Creation