AGRARCO is a project funded and supervised by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and managed by the Azerbaijan Food Safety Agency (AFSA). This is a part of a project where Tracified has piloted a food traceability solution in Azerbaijan at a National Level.

This project gives concern to a multiple of crops with a focus on export and the main objective of this is to ensure food safety. The project has been implemented with a vision of extending it to the Asian region.

Agrarco LLC is a well renowned company located in the Baku city of Azerbaijan. It engages in the production and export of top quality hazelnuts and fresh fruit varieties including apples, pears, peaches, plums, cherries and nectarines. Their mission is to provide transparency and traceability of information to their customers so that they may enjoy the fresh and environment-friendly products produced and offered to the market.

The processing facility of Agrarco is located in Zaqatala district of Azerbaijan and it is equipped with an array of modern technology; a hub comprising of fully automated hazelnut crashing mechanisms, a processing facility, a cooling warehouse which controls the relative humidity and temperature. In addition Agrarco consists of a internationally certified laboratory with accredited quality controls to test the products and also an appealing guest house.

Agrarco mainly exports products to Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, Russia and Belgium. They provide a full range of the fruit supply chain from cultivation and processing to packaging and delivery.

The Government of Azerbaijan has planned to adopt food safety laws and regulations but the agri industry of Azerbaijan is associated with a small-holder of farmers and small-scale business operators. Therefore, the ADB has planned to implement a food traceability system with the main objective of providing supply chain transparency to the consumers. The requirement was to track and trace their products from it being raw materials to it being presented as final products ensuring that the food is safe and nutrious. Therefore, initiating a mechanism for proper traceability could be the foremost course of action taken to adopt food safety laws and regulations imposed by the Azerbaijan Government.

The company has done a self evaluation regarding their current production processes and have decided to move forward with the Tracified platform to make their operations more transparent to their consumers. This will enable Agrarco to stand out in the market of the same domain.

End to end capture of AGRARCO export value chain by Tracified.

TM Tracified has implemented a traceability solution secured with a public blockchain . Tracified executed a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) mechanism for batch tracking whereby digital data encoded in RFID tags will be captured by RFID readers. Scanning QR codes and Bar codes of each and every bag or lot, of Hazelnut was a tedious task and it was overcome by the use of the RFID tags.

Hazelnut bags contain RFID encoded tags and those could be read by the RFID readers located at the farms. It can also be read using handheld RFID readers.

Tracified comprises of specific web portals and mobile applications for viewing and entering data whenever and wherever it is required.

Tracified Insights Portal - for extended business insights (showcasing the traceability data added under the items by the Field Officers) Tracified implemented a new module for recall management.

Tracified Field Officer Application - used to enter traceability data to the system.

Tracified Consumer Application - used by consumers in order to view the traceability data during each and every stage of the supply chain process, to view the origin, safety, sustainability, and communities supported, and to rate products.

Tracified Wallet Application - used specifically for Blockchain related asset transactions and it can also perform a change of custody and accept or reject change of custody requests.

Freshness : This Dimension reflects the quality related to freshness of the product.

Safety : The Dimension that reflects certificates, standards, and processes owned by the business to entrust the safety of the food consumed by the consumers.

Sustainability : This Dimension informs customers that a business delivers more value to society than just a product. Sustainability badges are awarded to a business based on the good practices followed during the production process.

Community : It’s the Dimension that reflects how the purchase by a customer nurtures the community as a whole.

Tracified has its own report generation functionality implemented within the system itself. Reports that have been created through the in-built report generator are produced to the AFSA or to the Exporter and those include;

• Reports in terms of quantity of production
• Reports in terms of quality of production
• Reports in terms of efficiency of production
• Reports of ratings and feedback
• Reports of recalled products.

Tracified powered by Blockchain technology facilitates a tamper proof platform that streamlines the data flow within a supply chain, introducing a novel crypto-economic model, based on a reward/penalty concept, ensuring fair distribution of gains across the chain. Tracified is designed and developed in a way to capture data from a business’s available data sources (i.e. ERPs, SCMs), IoT devices or data recording mobile apps (such as Tracified Field Officer app). The data to be captured, the stages through which an item goes and what data is shown to the customer can be configured through the Tracified Configurations Portal. This makes Tracified a 100% configurable product that satisfies the business needs.

The objective of this project was to implement a technology solution that may allow AFSA to gather insights into the scalability of the traceability pilot system across the entire value chain in the country. As the demand on the ICT-based food safety and traceability solutions are growing, the ADB will expand this project to similar companies in Azerbaijan.