Appendices: other (useful) information
Which other information does the Beantracker track? The Beantracker tracks the payments for the premiums Tony’s Open Chain mission allies pay the cooperatives which, in turn, distribute the premiums to the individual farmers as determined by the farmers themselves. Once the beans have reached either the butter factory SACO or the chocolate manufacturer in Belgium, an invoice is triggered in the system. This creates a transparent flow and enables co-ops to request their premium payments. We also link other data sources – like GPS mapping data and current productivity levels – in the Beantracker. This gives an at-a-glance snapshot of where the cocoa comes from and whether deliveries are feasible. Based on the GPS mapping data, the size of each farm is known and therefore also the possible amount of cocoa that can be grown on that plot of land. The Beantracker triggers a warning once a farmer has delivered more than 100% of their estimated yield which will lead to the local team to follow up with the co-op and the respective farmer to make sure no external cocoa is entering the flow. The system also includes historical production data as well as current production totals. That way every bean grown by every farmer can be traced back to its origin. Why is Tony’s Open Chain not brand-to-bean traceable? While we are traceable from bean to bar, it is not possible to trace bar to bean. The main focus of traceability is to create responsibility and accountability by knowing where the cocoa comes from. Only when having this knowledge is it possible to have a positive impact on the communities we source from. There is very limited added value of knowing from which farmer exactly the beans for a certain batch of bars came from. There will, first of all, most likely be a mix of Ghanaian and Ivorian beans as all of our butter comes from Côte d’Ivoire. Roughly speaking, about 20% of the beans come from Ghana and 80% from Côte d’Ivoire, however 100% of the cocoa butter that is used in our chocolate comes from Côte d’Ivoire. Additionally, the cocoa mass, butter and powder are respectively put together in the process of making the chocolate. Why does Tony’s Open Chain not work with Blockchain? For a two-month period, in cooperation with Accenture, we logged and monitored the cocoa bean flow. 63 delegees and one cooperative Socoopacdi and one local trader, Ocean, participated. We tracked about 900K kg beans, around 400 transactions (registrations, movements, and corrections), 35 shipments between cooperative and local trader (trucks) and 12 international shipments. The main obstacle for a traceability platform is translating a physical product (a bag of beans) to a digital data point. This is a big cost driver. Unlike bitcoin, which is a 100% virtual world, in the cocoa value chain, we deal with physical goods which easily can be misplaced. A bag of cocoa may be torn, fallen off a truck or misplaced by putting it on the other side of chalk line in a dusty warehouse. If not all these changes are logged, the inflow of data which determines the outcome of the dataset is flawed. Timely data is also a challenge because many of the cocoa locations are in regions with bad to no network coverage. The conclusions of the pilot: There is important potential in blockchain technology for traceability which is worth investigating. But we anticipate it will take another 3-5 years for it to become business operations viable. We have a functional and operational traceability platform that performs the same
service with a different technology. Find the whole Forbes article here.
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Tony’s Open Chain impact report 2021/22
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