BONAFIDE – New Eurostars innovation project for food sector transparency
The project is a collaborative effort of three SMEs, lead by MarkMar ehf in Iceland in collaboration with the Icelandic start-up company iMonIT ehf, and ASSIST SOFTWARE SRL in Romania. The project is part of the Eurostars program that is supported by 33 European countries to facilitate innovation for Small and Medium sized Entererprises (SME). The Icelandic part of the grant funding for the BONAFIDE project comes from Tækniþróunarsjóður.
Today, consumers consider several factors, besides cost, when making buying decisions such as origin, production practices and environmental impacts. Currently, no commercial solution exists that integrates whole supply chain, interoperable information based on traceability, and environmental sustainability of food products that enables communication of this information to the end consumers of the food products. Current systems mainly focus on delivering information to the responsible supply chain partners directly involved with the trade and transport logistics.
The BONAFIDE mobile application developed in this project will enable access to the supply chain data made available in the Business Cloud System (iM-BCS), which is being developed by partner iMonIT. This data is being pushed into the iM-BCS by primary food producers regarding their individual food product specifications, processes, origins of raw materials and ingredients, and critical traceability and sustainability information attached for each product lot delivered into the supply chain. Thus, this EUROSTARS project creates the direct linking of critical information of interest to the consumers to establish and maintain trust and transparency in the receiving end of the chain. Furthermore, the mobile application (the BONAFIDE APP) will be designed to allow consumers to create their own profiles containing information suiting their particular interests and needs, like e.g. requirements based on their preferences, such as organic, fair trade, allergies, religion or specific food niches defined by themselves. Consumers will thus be empowered to explore the products, their provenance of origin, sustainability criteria etc., and furthermore share the information and opinions about the products they have purchased.
The BONAFIDE solution is built on top of an iMonIT designed Business Cloud for Sustainable Food Supply Chains (iM-BCS), which enables enterprises of any size to integrate smart tools for whole supply chain traceability for market information transparency. The solution provides clients with access to traceable market intelligence enabling enhanced, trust-based trade opportunities, giving buyers and traders further down a supply chain access to real-time information on the product they are buying/trading. The iM-BCS integrates smart tools for whole chain traceability using the business cloud as the data medium. The flow of information and data analytics from product suppliers to the final buyers can be made accessible to the consumers through appropriate data layering and a consumer friendly mobile application, i.e. the BONAFIDE APP.