Nowadays, most of the retailers want to know where their food comes from. Plenty of startups are using blockchain technology, for its security and transparency rather than cryptocurrency.

Wholechain is a platform built on blockchain technology focused on helping fragmented food, and agriculture supply chains trace product steps from their origin to their final destination.

Often described as a virtual distributed ledger system, blockchain technology provides a chain of related and timestamped records, that are linked using cryptography. Thus the information is not only simple to track but also highly secure and hard to tamper.

“We provide a route for the whole supply chain to obtain and provide data,” says co-founder Jason Berryhill.

The startup also was among the six companies that received awards at the recent fourth and last Fish 2.0 biennial Global Innovators Forum, an 18-month process during which startups obtained feedback from investors, peers, and others while they sharpened their strategies.

In 2018, co-founder Mark Kaplan and Berryhill rotated ‘Wholechain’ from ‘Envisible,’ a company they launched that year. 

Envisible, a joint venture with food distributor ‘ARKK Food Company,’ uses the blockchain platform, which is the base for Wholechain. The enterprise aims at providing services for retailers to trace where the seafood they are selling comes from, assuring the fare is high quality and sustainably sourced. 

As required, working with Envisible, retailers can draw information about the fish’s origin and create narratives that consumers can get access to by scanning a QR code at the time of sale.

Wholechain Traces the Supply Chain

Wholechain is all about locating the supply chain for the various parties on the way, helping everyone achieve the data and structure it to be meaningful. That is vital for seafood, for which it’s more complicated than to, say, pharmaceuticals, to pinpoint where the product originated. 

“This is something that starts swimming in the ocean and moving around,” says Berryhill. Thus, the collection of data starts with fishers, which capture data using their mobile devices. 

Then the system goes from processors to distributors and from retailers to restaurants. While Wholechain is starting with seafood, the plan is to include other varieties of food and agricultural products.

Wholechain’s consumers probably will include all those various supply chain parties. For retailers, the appeal is the ability to learn and envision data, while producers get a way to capture data in a digitized format. That’s a noticeable change for fishers, who tend to be low tech.

“A lot of time, we’re substituting pen and paper,” says Berryhill.

Last month, Envisible launched a collaboration with Mastercard, which has over 100 blockchain patents filed and is number three globally among top blockchain innovators, according to a Mastercard press release. 

The credit card giant will combine its blockchain-based system with Wholechain’s front-end platform. The system is piloted by ‘Topco Associates,’ a U.S. food cooperative, for use by its member-owner grocery chains. First up is Food City, starting with salmon, cod, and shrimp.