Primority and EVRYTHNG revolutionize the supply chain with IOTA

In a new edition of the IOTA Podcast “Untangled” the two CTOs of Primority and EVRYTHNHG talked about the cooperation with IOTA.
Both projects intend to revolutionize the supply chain by using the IOTA Tangle.

Currently many supply chains lack transparency. Increasing this transparency is a complex task. It is even more difficult to communicate this transparency to consumers. Especially in the food and fashion industry, consumers want to make informed choices in order to buy sustainable products and promote fair working conditions in developing countries.

Public ledgers, such as IOTA, can help producers by storing production data and allowing each customer to access this data either through a special app or through a simple web interface. In order to implement this mission, IOTA entered into a partnership with EVRYTHNG in April 2019, aimed at making the supply chain of products transparent.

EVRYTHNG gives a unique digital identity to a range of consumer products. With the help of this identity, an object can be tracked along its production chain while data about its manufacturing process is collected. IOTA has also entered into a partnership with Primority in June 2019 to make allergens in food more transparent.

In the latest edition of the IOTA podcast “Untangled”, James Flynn and Dominique Guinard, both CTO’s and co-founders of Primority and EVRYTHNHG, shared their insights from their fields of expertise and reported more about their collaboration with IOTA.

Primority tracks food allergens via the IOTA Tangle

James Flynn of Primority explained that 60% of all goods are wrongly labelled when it comes to allergens. In addition, much of the documentation in the supply chain is still done on paper, for example to record the cooling temperature of products. Flynn went on to explain that IoT is an ideal supply chain application because many processes can be automated.

Flynn cited the recent meat scandal in the UK where contamination occurred because the speed of the assembly line was too fast to clean the equipment thoroughly. With IoT equipment, the speed could be measured, adjusted and checked, thus preventing the meat scandal.

He also noted that the food industry has been “audited to death” in the last 5 to 10 years. This costs is not only costing much time but also money, he said. IoT can fully automate this process. Flynn goes on to say that blockchain technology is currently very much in focus in the supply chain industry, but is currently very much limited to the traceability of products.

As a small company, Primority wants to take a different approach and is looking for other use cases besides traceability. While searching, Primority became aware of IOTA:

Today we have 4 developers in the UK and 2 developers in India. And the guys in the UK are working on a project related on how we can use supply chain intelligence that’s based on artifical intelligence and how we can get that to the IOTA Tangle and make best use for the industry and the regulators alike. What we have build is a proof of concept to this point.

Flynn went on to explain how the company will use the IOTA Tangle:

You have to test periodically for those allergenes to make that sure that it is what it says. Our software digitizes the whole process by making sure the correct infiormations are asked for in a consistant way and can be verified consistent way […] It is this data that we can take and publish it to the IOTA Tangle. And then we devlop a mobile app to enable the camera in the fron to scan a barcode and look up in real time which allergenes are claimed to be in.

EVRYTHNHG intends to expand use cases with IOTA

Dominique Guinard of EVRYTHNHG describes how his company gives products a digital identity to track the product life cycle of everyday products. The IOTA Tangle is used to store the information forgery-proof and to make it visible for everyone. The first use cases were very successful, so he can imagine an expansion:

I can see IOTA being used for a number of use cases. But the one already being used live is tracability and product providence. So we already have live products out there which are alrady using this integration. For instance the Alyx brand where they use IOTA to put some of their supply chain data to basically put a proof on the DLT. This gives a additional trust to the consumer.

The full episode of Untangled can be found at this link.