Yesterday, food safety company Neogen announced a partnership with blockchain firm ripe.io. The U.S.-based firm aims to use Ripe’s blockchain solution for food safety diagnostics and animal genomics.
Founded in 2016, San Francisco-based Ripe is a food traceability blockchain that is working on building trust and confidence in supply chains. It enables to track and trace of the product to improve brand integrity, allowing transparency, and better food security. Ripe has raised $2.4 million to date, according to Crunchbase.
Meanwhile, Neogen provides test kits and other products to detect toxic substances in food. It also offers genomics services for DNA testing of poultry, eggs, beef cattle and other animals. These services allow breeders to meet the increasing demand sustainably while ensuring the quality of meat.
“Blockchain has tremendous potential throughout the food and livestock industries, both to verify the authenticity of premium products, such as cage-free eggs, and enhance the traceability of issues that require correction, such as those that lead to product recalls,” said John Adent, CEO of Neogen.
“The technology permanently connects a tremendous amount of potentially critical data, including results from Neogen’s tests, to a food product or animal.”
Adent added that by adopting blockchain, the genomic profile of a dairy cow could be connected with the feed the animal eats, its medical history, barn environment, quantity, and quality of the milk it produces, among other things.
Under the partnership, Ripe’s blockchain solution will be integrated with the Neogen Analytics platform, helping customers make data-driven decisions. By automating and connecting different data points, food producers and processors can efficiently map the risk areas and make operational changes for better output.
“Neogen’s diagnostics and DNA expertise can add the highest degree of transparency and factual correctness for critical issues around authenticity and accuracy on food recalls,” said Raja Ramachandran, founder and CEO of Ripe.io.
Ripe’s food traceability platform is built using R3’s Corda blockchain. The founder, Ramachandran, previously worked as a managing director for product at R3. It’s differentiating itself from other platforms by going a step further with analysis, as demonstrated by this partnership.
Last year, Ripe.io said it was working with the National Pork Board on a blockchain pilot. Additionally, the firm has worked with the Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) for deploying blockchain applications in the food and agriculture industry.
Food traceability using blockchain is a popular use case. IBM’s Food Trust is another high-profile initiative with participation from big brands like Nestle and Carrefour.
