Olive Oil Producers Employ Blockchain to Verify Authenticity
IBM and olive oil producers Conde de Benalua, a cooperative in Spain made up of more than 2,000 farmers, and Rolar de Cuyo, an olive oil supplier in Argentina, today announced they are using IBM Food Trust on IBM Cloud to trace the lifecycle of their product and provide traceability, authenticity and quality for consumers. They join CHO, a Tunisia-based producer that makes Terra Delyssa brand olive oil, and I Potti de Fratini, a family-run oil mill in Italy, which joined IBM Food Trust earlier in 2020.
Using blockchain technology, these companies from around the world are promoting greater consumer trust in their olive oil and working to create a more efficient and transparent supply chain.
Consumers’ demand for transparency and general distrust have been driven by recent reports of olive oil counterfeits and adulteration. That trend is reflected in a broader context, according to a recent IBM Institute for Business Value study, which found that 73% of consumers will pay a premium for full transparency into the products they buy.
“Our mission is to provide customers quality olive oil so they can enjoy a genuine and healthy product. Rolar de Cuyo’s objective in using blockchain technology is to ensure olive oil packers worldwide trust us and choose us. IBM blockchain technology provides the transparency we need to trace the origin of our products, complying with all quality processes to reach consumers’ tables,” said Guillermo José Albornoz, Rolar de Cuyo Director.
IBM Food Trust uses IBM Blockchain technology and IBM Cloud to close the information gap for customers. By scanning a QR code on each bottle of olive oil, consumers can trace its production from the groves where the olives were grown, to the mills where they were processed into oil, to the stores where it is sold. They can see images of where the olives were picked and pressed and get to know the farmers and workers behind the scenes and even review what criteria was met for the oil in each bottle. For example, the tracing will show whether the olives were processed to the standards required to be labeled extra virgin olive oil.
It is you, the buyer who should do some product inspections in order to https://pdxcommercial.com/property/1105-portland-avenue-gladstone/ cialis no prescription purchase the best computer. uk cialis sales If someone is ordering this drug via online and not acquired prescription, then he may acquire important information from the online drugstores. If you do not time during the weekdays then plan your buy cheapest cialis weekend with a dinner to make quality communication. To grab these medicines all you have to do is visit these stores online and get the most favorable deals in the market. buy tadalafil mastercard On the production side, members of the supply chain can work together with greater confidence and efficiency, creating a permanent digital record of transactions that can be easily shared with permissioned parties. This data within IBM Food Trust can also be used to help ensure the freshness of food, control storage times and reduce waste.
“Our Terra Delyssa brand of premium olive oil has seen a spike in demand since bottles of traceable olive oil reached stores shelves earlier this year. Consumers in the US and Canada can now buy Terra Delyssa premium extra virgin olive oil in more than 10,000 grocery stores and online platforms, with more retailers adding Terra Delyssa’s premium, traceable olive oil to their shelves,” said Chris Fowler, Sales Manager at CHO America.
The growing demand in early January helped CHO anticipate a spike in sales due to its new consumer traceability app. Supply chains had ample products on store shelves throughout the pandemic, during which time demand rose 30% due to an increase in consumers cooking at home.
CHO is now working on creating a separate enterprise application for distributors and retailers. This app will provide access to in-depth information about each processing and control stage that a certain lot has passed through, including whether it was first cold-pressed, extra virgin or organic, with analysis from CHO’s International Olive Council-accredited laboratory and third-party auditors.
“Our continuing work with olive oil producers demonstrates the growing momentum around Food Trust and our commitment to strengthening the chain that connects food from farm to table around the world,” said Raj Rao, General Manager, IBM Blockchain Platforms. “There’s a growing desire among consumers to know where their food comes from and an increased business motivation to optimize processes with better supply insights. We’re able to work with olive oil producers and distributors provide a single source of secured and transparent information through IBM Blockchain technology.”
Bono Extra-Virgin Olive Oils Offer Quality, Transparency
By Lorrie Baumann
Bono‘s premium Sicilian extra-virgin olive oils represent some of the most traceable on the market. At least for now, those oils are not subject to tariffs on a wide variety of other European food products, including the extra virgin olive oil coming onto the market now from Bono’s new production facility in Spain. In addition, the company also operates an oil factory in Tunisia, and that oil also is not subject to tariffs.
Bono USA is the American satellite of the vertically integrated producer and trader of extra-virgin olive oil producer Bonolio. It’s been operating in the U.S. since 2015 under the leadership of Salvatore Russo-Tiesi, General Manager and President of the U.S. office. “Since then, we’ve been having great success in this country, both in private label and with the brand,” he said. In those four years, Russo-Tiesi has taken the U.S. brand presence for Bono to distribution in all 50 states. The brand is now sold at more than 5,000 locations across the country. The product lines offered in the U.S. include Mediterranean Extra Virgin Olive Oil, produced in Italy, Spain, Greece and Tunisia and packed in Italy; 100% Product of Italy Organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil produced in Sicily, Calabria and Puglia; PDO Val di Mazara Organic Olive Oil and Extra Virgin Olive Oil PDO– Val di Mazara, among others.
Each oil has its own certifications, depending largely on the origin of the olives from which it was made.
“Our distribution is led by our Sicilian-certified product that comes with PDO and PGI certification,” Russo-Tiesi said. The PDO- and PGI-certified oils guarantee that the origin of the olives as well as the factory that produces the oil is grown, harvested and processed exclusively in the Val di Mazara region of west-central Sicily, which includes the province of Palermo and western Agrigento Province. “Those certifications guarantee quality and traceability,” Russo-Tiesi said.
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To attain the certifications, the company worked with a third-party auditor that “came in and tracked everything from the first day the olive grows on the tree to the day we bottle the oil,” which provides full transparency, according to Russo-Tiesi. “We have a very high-quality product, a very traceable product. Each bottle has its own serial number that kind of acts like a VIN number on a car, so you can trace each bottle of olive oil back to the producer, which is us, and where it comes from – the Sicilian land.”
In addition to the certification standards, the PDO and PGI bodies contribute their store of accumulated wisdom about oleiculture, which Russo-Tiesi says helps the company to grow the highest-quality olives and thus to produce the highest-quality olive oil. “The PDO and PGI [which also certifies protected designations] bodies are with us every step of the production and selling way,” Russo-Tiesi said.
The success of their efforts is measured by the more than 50 awards that Bono has taken home for its oils over the past decade. “The Bono family has done a great job,” Russo-Tiesi said. “It’s four brothers from a very close-knit family that have taken this factory to new levels. They’re now one of the top five premier extra-virgin olive oil traders [by volume of extra-virgin olive oil] in Italy. They’re now expanding and investing greatly into Spain and Tunisia.”
For more information, visit www.bonousainc.com.
Rehabilitating Palm Oil’s Reputation
By Lorrie Baumann
Neil Blomquist is on a quest to persuade consumers that palm oil isn’t inherently either unhealthy or immoral. He’s fighting his battles in a world in which his audience has already been bombarded with publicity that suggests otherwise.
Palm oil came to dominate the vegetable oil market after trans-fats were discovered to be harmful to human health, partly because, like coconut oil, it’s a solid at room temperature and has a high smoke point and largely because the trees that produce the fruit from which the palm oil is made are so productive. Oil palm trees are six to 10 times more efficient at producing oil than oilseed crops such as canola, soybean, olive and sunflower. A hectare of oil palms (about 2.5 acres) produces an average of about 3 tons of oil per year, and theoretical productivity is more than 8 tons of oil per year. Soybeans, the world’s second-leading source of vegetable oil, yield about half a ton of oil per hectare. In addition, oil palms are a permanent crop that doesn’t have to be replanted every year. “You plant a tree, and you can harvest fruit from that tree for up to 40 years,” Blomquist said. “It doesn’t require annual replanting. Farmers are cutting fruit from the tree every week and get a constant flow of income.”
That productivity made the oil cheaper to produce than its alternatives, which made it a natural choice in 2006 when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration required food manufacturers to declare trans fats on their product labels. Trans fats were banned from the nation’s food supply in 2018, three years after the FDA ruled that they are unsafe to eat. Demand for the oil was also prompted by the passage of laws by Western nations in the mid-2000s to encourage the use of vegetable oils in fuels, which was supposed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and help curb global warming as well as cut the United States’ dependence on foreign oil.
The boom in demand for the oil led to widespread clearing of tropical rain forest to plant oil palms. Global palm oil production increased from 15.2 million tons in 1995 to 62.6 million tons in 2015, according to the European Palm Oil Alliance. Production is led by Indonesia and Malaysia, which are the leading exporters of palm oil worldwide.
By 2018, more than 3.5 million hectares of Indonesian and Malaysian rain forest had been cleared, destroying about 80 percent of orangutan habitat and putting the apes on the World Wildlife Fund‘s critically endangered list. Fewer than 80,000 orangutans survive in the wild today, according to the WWF, and shrinking forest habitat in the region is also threatening elephants, the Sumatran Rhino and the Sumatran Tiger, all also critically endangered.
Environmental organizations alarmed by the loss of wildlife habitat and by the climate change impacts of widespread deforestation began applying very public pressure to industrial users of palm oil. Under pressure from these powerful advocacy groups, some manufacturers and restaurant chains have eliminated palm oil from their recipes, other palm oil buyers have switched to palm oil that’s certified not to have contributed to deforestation, and some are still embroiled in the controversy.
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The World Wildlife Fund provides an online scorecard that scores Ahold, the Delhaize Group, Walmart and Britain’s Marks & Spencer with a perfect 9 out of 9 points on a scale that rewards companies for commitment to responsible sourcing of palm oil; Costco, Kroger and Target with a 2 score and Safeway with a 1. Among manufacturers, Ferrero, FrieslandCampina, Mars and Hershey all received perfect 9-point scores, while Smucker’s got 4 points and Campbell’s got 2.
It’s not all about shame and blame, though – the World Wildlife Fund is also a founding member of the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil, which creates standards for sustainable palm oil production and certifies qualified growers and processors. According to the WWF, about 20 percent of the world’s palm oil is now certified sustainable by the RSPO.
Blomquist is the Director of Innovation and Business Development for Natural Habitats, which produces palm oil in Ecuador, and he’s a fan as well as an employee. He says that his company, a member of the RSPO, complies with the strictest RSPO standards to ensure that entire supply chain is fully traceable, that all of its oil is grown under sustainable organic practices to protect the watershed and the soil and that Natural Habitats has also gone above and beyond by adopting social justice practices that protect the workers that produce the oil. He says that his company is one of three major producers in the world that protect both the environment and the indigenous communities in the tropical regions where the oil palm is cultivated.
Natural Habitats calls its approach “Palm Done Right.” The company is currently sourcing its oil from 180 small Ecuadorian farms converted from conventional to organic agriculture. “There are new farmers in queue all the time because we’re growing and need more oil,” Blomquist said. “Our focus is on transitioning conventional farmers to organic.”
“When you look at the mill itself, we have a much more sustainable system: little to no waste, and water effluent is treated into a final water that you can grow tilapia in,” he added. “When you press the oil, you get fiber, which is collected and used as fuel for the boilers.”
Ecuadorian law provides some protection for the farmers, with labor laws that mandate a minimum wage and provide for health care coverage for workers, but enforcement is spotty, Blomquist said, and so Palm Done Right also carries Fair for Life certification, which provides additional protection for both the workers who grow the oil palms and those who process the oil. “It’s a much more transparent relationship with the workers,” Blomquist said. “We make sure the farmers follow these higher level rules as well.”
