# Building Consumer Facing Interfaces for Trust in Supply Chains

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2018-10-07
- Duration: 17:23
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-tx_07shaB9w
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx_07shaB9w

## Description

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/3/building-consumer-facing-interfaces-for-trust-in-supply-chains

Provenance is building a platform to make consumer product supply chains more transparent. Taking advantage of Ethereum and IPFS, we’ve been iterating through a number of pilots in different industries, from organic bacon to fair-trade coconuts to enable a simple shared and trusted way to share the proven claims behind our products e.g. organic or proof of payment of fair wages, and link that to the flow of batches of product. Throughout this journey, we have learnt a lot about industry needs, working with both small and large retailers and brands. We’ve also forged partnerships with sustainability standards e.g Soil Association organic and other data systems that we can connect to enable verification of claims and inputs for our Ethereum based app e.g. Sourcemap. User centred design is core to the work at Provenance – exploring how we can make blockchain backed data appear differently on the frontend and provide accessible links to inspect the chain. As a social enterprise largely built through grant funding and with the support of academia we are keen to share our learnings with the developer community and gauge interest in forming a group around the development of blockchain backed interfaces for trusted data sets.

Speaker(s): Thibaut Schaeffer
Skill level: Intermediate
Track: UX & Design


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## Transcript

good morning everyone my name is Steve Scheffer I'm an engineer at provenance we're software company maybe some of you heard of us already or a base in London in the UK and basically just summing up the kind of division behind provenance is that every great product should come with provenance and what that means is towards trustworthy information and accessible information about the origin and the journey and the impact of that product and basically the way that we deliver on this vision is that we provide a platform for businesses to be more transparent and share data across the supply chain and as well as with consumers so that's both an access for businesses to share it also a consumer app that consumer can access to learn more about the supply chain and the great products that are being made so one aspect of this platform has to do with storytelling because we believe that just disclosing how you make your products and and the craft that's put into them is already a good going the right direction in terms of transparency but obviously what I'm going to be presenting today is more of a verifiable aspects of what we what the platform allows so we almost everything we do at provenance around that is linked to the country the concept a verifiable claim so I'm sure many of you are familiar with the the concept of an identity framework so there's been a few presentation at Def Con already on that and there are many initiatives going on the concept that individuals could control their identity and once they control the identity make claims about themselves and then have those claims being verified by third parties or different verification methods so for example you could want to prove that you are over a certain age to access a particular service and then you can have that verified by let's say a bank or or a peer-to-peer verification method the important point here is that a claim and a verification are two different things and that and what we do try to keep the verification method as generic as possible so that people can integrate their own verification methods with the system and as you can see what we are trying to do is taking this concept of verifiable claims on individuals and bring that to the supply chain I means two businesses and there are products so first let's let's look at businesses what what type of claims could a business a business make so one example that you could have is that as a business you want to claim that you're independent or that you're a family-owned and in this case the way to verify that could be for example to link to your business registration that's exposed by the government especially in the UK there's companies house that exposes this information and that can act as a verification that you are for example not owned by another bigger company you could have other verification methods that could be linked that could be based on consumers vetting for the businesses that they know in the same way in a same kind of way that TripAdvisor or Yelp functions of course not all verification methods are equal and they provide different levels of trust and different levels of confidence on city of the claim another type of claim that that's that's really common in supply chains as that of certification and in this field what we what we did is working with the Sioux Association which is the first which is the biggest organic search fire in the UK and working with them to bring their certification to the digital age so what what what does that mean what I think we needed a bit of context around what a certification process looks like today for a sustainability certification so basically as a business if you want to be certified organic you're going to apply for a certification obviously pay a fee which can be quite expensive sometimes for small businesses then you're going to be audited by an independent auditor and if if all goes well you are going to be awarded a certification what that means in terms of data is that it's just another record in solar association database that keeps track of all certifications and the way as a business you are going to be able to prove that is through PDF that is sent to you it's basically a certificate of organic so when you're going to be transacting with your business partners you need to prove to them that you're certified organic you end up moving back and forth PDFs in a supply chain from the point of view of the consumer the interaction that the consumer would have with a sustainability certification most of the time is either through just a logo unpack or it's going to be a static JPEG on on a website for example so that's where we saw some opportunities to make that better and make it more interactive and and and interoperable so what we did is connecting the solar Association certification database to the ethereum blockchain so that directly on the theory on blockchain you could check the status of any certification for any licensee of the Soil Association creating a kind of a digital version of that certification the outcome of this project was that we created material both for point of sale so in the form of connected labels that you that consumers can can scan either by NFC or QR codes and we're very excited that NFC is now being supported by by the new version of iOS so that consumers can access directly is to this information at the point of sale and when it comes to digital space we created embeds that brands that were certified organic can integrate in their online store so that consumers again can access and verify the status of the certification on top of that the fact that we provided those tools to kind of augment the certification allowed to raise awareness on what the certification actually means and what it stands for because we believe that just just just a logo unpack it's not enough to convey what the audit process was and and what actually the compliance look looks like so moving from businesses what we're trying to do is also to have verifiable claims on products so when when you think about a product one verifiable claim that you could have is for example that it's free of a particular allergen and a way to verify that could be either by normal audits but also increasingly and and and it's getting cheaper through things like DNA testing if we're also looking at but in this context we saw that a very useful tool to prove claims about products was that of a tracking system along the supply chain that's why--that's we we developed a way to track assets along the supply chain and tested that in different pilots so maybe someone in the room so our peace on toon a supply chain we basically studied tunas to play a sustainable tuna supply chain over in Indonesia and basically the setup was that there there's there was a certification over in Indonesia according to sustainability practices that was certifying specific fishermen that could that like that could produce tuna that was certified so that was going great but the the problem with this was that when looking at the supply chain there were there was way more fish being sold at the end of supply chain with the certification then there was certifications being issued at the start so basically what we were trying to solve with and in this particular project was the double spending of certificate of sustainability certification claims on tuna so what we built for that was an interface for fishermen to register their catch yeah batch of tuna using SMS services because in the environment we were operating in there was even no smartphone to use so it had to go through SMS those catches would be linked to the certification that the fishermen had been awarded before and then they were able to transfer ownership of this these batches down the supply chain and at each step a transfer would be a handshake between this sender and the receiver agreeing on the details about the fish so that can be the size of the batch in vitro certification itself and so on another project that we that we did in supply chains was with co-op which is the fifth biggest supermarket chain over in the UK and for that we extended our our system our tracking system to support more features and such as supporting different units using ipfs method data on the SS more data on the assets as well as batching splitting of batches transformation from one asset to another to have to allow for more flexibility in supply chains so what we did with co-op is and what is interesting in comparison with the previous example is that we were focusing on claims of proof of origin so we were trying to prove that some products that were sold by a co-op were actually made in the UK so that was that was a claim we were going for and for that we went in co-op supply chain and and and obviously it was a more it has some degree of digitalization so compared to the previous one where was just normal phones they have air peas they have systems in supply chain so kind of the challenge and the learnings that we had through this experience is how to integrate with those with their systems and the result of that was was that we created an interface for consumers to access the journey of those products so in this case it was about flowers but we also considered other products and we integrated that in to the coop consumer app so that consumer can directly discover this and explore the the journey of the products that were being sold so the next the next question that we asked was how how we can incentivize good behavior in this system is I'm sure most of you recognize that it's it's not a completely trust the system and and and they can be breeches and and and and honest players and what we recognize is that linking this infrastructure for trusts with the incentives of supply chain especially financial incentives could be a way to incentivize good behavior so kind of the MVP version of that that we developed recently was in the frame a collaboration that we did with a Dutch NGO called Fairfield so in this case we were focusing on coconut supply chains in Indonesia so again Indonesia and the claim that we were trying to prove was the fair payments to the farmer at the first stage of the of the chain so I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of fair trade but in this case we're trying to do it in a completely real-time way improved on chain so the way it happened is that we provided again an interface through SMS services because again people didn't have access to smart phones where we were operating and we were enabling farmers to register the coconuts that they had harvested and as as a batch and then some of the handshakes in the supply chain needed a proof of payment to actually happen and the way that happened in practice is that whenever the next actor in the chain so that was the trader that came just after the farmer that harvested requested ownership of a particular asset the the farmer would get an SMS asking them if they got a particular amount that verse that they were supposed to have got because it's supposed to be basically an exchange and depending on the answer that the farmer would provide to this question the transfer would complete or be rejected so in terms of the amount that was in this message the amount was determined by fair food which was this NGO based on a standard of living income so it dependent on different parameters including the size of the batch of coconuts obviously and what was quite interesting in this case is that we were trying to see if we could have some impact on the supply chain itself and actually among the set of farmers that we considered a few of them actually answer no to the question from the SMS and when we when we investigated it appeared that some of the farmers were actually only being paid a small deposit on their own their harvest and actually the fact that the system was in place and and that the the transfer couldn't be completed led to the actual payment to be to be made in info so it was it was the first sign that we can have an impact on how supply chains operate so I will see that's that's still kind of a first first iteration on how we could connect this set of claims to fire to to incentives and supply chains and what we are starting to also look at now as a next iteration of that is how we can connect our system with trade finance and insurance so that as a business any transparency that any transparency and claims that you make that make your product more transparent should be rewarded in terms of better access to capital or cheaper access to insurance and so on so we're going to be starting some projects on that and we'll sure have some announcement and announcements to make on on that soon so yeah that was that was pretty much what we've going what we've been doing in in in the past month and yeah please reach out to me thank you very much for your attention [Applause] [Music]