Food supply chains are complex and verifying claims of responsible or sustainable production is challenging. Yet growing demand from consumers to know where their food is coming from, and new regulations are demanding transparency and accountability across all stages of production. Investing in traceability helps ensure all food commodities, from shrimp to palm oil, travel through the supply chain with clear visibility on social and environmental impacts, including food safety, environmental degradation, labor and human rights, and more.
Food production is a major economic activity for people around the world but particularly in developing countries. Traceability technology can be costly for food producers to utilize, so World Wildlife Fund set out to develop accessible technologies that remove the cost barriers that prevent advancing traceability across these supply chains.
Traceability in our food system often collapses due to an inability to organize diverse actors in complex supply chains. To alleviate these pressures, WWF developed transparenC, the first open-source, free, traceability software for commodity supply chains. This cloud-based smartphone app and desktop web portal can be used anywhere by farmers, buyers, retailers, and everyone in between without paying licensing fees that can be a barrier for disaggregated supply chains, especially in developing countries.
Created through a collaboration between WWF and Republic Systems, the software was developed to be a tool for use in production countries but transparenC’s capabilities have also been used in other commodity supply chains helping drive greater awareness of the origin of our food.
transparenC is already hard at work making supply chains more transparent:
