On 21 September 2020, Australian agritech firm Entrust announced it will leverage Hedera Hashgraph’s public distributed ledger (DLT) for food and wine traceability. Having officially launched this Sunday, Entrust aims to combat wine fraud by enabling consumers to verify a bottle’s authenticity, with the dairy sector as its next target.
More than a dozen wine companies in the Clare Valley are participating in a trial, including well known Australian fine wines Grosset and Jim Barry. Entrust was co-founded by Jeffrey Grosset of Grosset Wines in part through AU$150,000 ($108,000) in backing from the Australian government. So far, more than 250,000 liters of wine are being tracked on the DLT.
Entrust allows for end-to-end tracking and tracing of products in the supply chain by combining various features such as geolocation, with the timestamping and immutability of Hedera Hashgraph. Specifically, producers can track primary products such as grapes, then continue tracking them along the supply chain once they’ve gone through the bottling and distribution process.
“Australia produces almost 2 million tonnes of winegrapes each year,” said Entrust’s Technical Director, Rob Allen. “As winemakers see the benefits of securing their Wine Australia Label Integrity Program data on Entrust, it is important the system is fast, cost-effective, secure and scalable.” He attributed this requirement as one of the reasons for selecting Hedera.
Hedera is not a blockchain, but a hashgraph developed for enterprise solutions and claims to be faster and more secure than blockchains. Since its initial launch, Hedera now has 15 governance council members, including Google, DLA Piper and IBM. Hedera raised $124 million in funding, and its current token market capitalization is $162 million.
Australia has seen its fair share of start-ups use blockchain and distributed ledger technology in agriculture and food traceability. In May, agritech firm Aglive announced it completed a blockchain traceability trial for beef shipments from Australia to China. Fruits are another commodity being tracked with blockchain supply chain platforms, with non-profit Citrus Australia piloting a blockchain-based traceability system.
In late August, the Australian government announced two new National Blockchain Roadmap Working Groups. One of these included the Supply Chains Working Group, whose role is to examine blockchain benefits in trusted supply chains, especially in agriculture.
