Verified Organic, which provides businesses and consumers full transparency to the organic food supply chain, has begun the first phase of tracking organic hemp production for Integrated CBD from seed to sale, using the Ethereum blockchain. The project launched in partnership with Treum (formerly Viant.io), a leading supply chain platform backed by ConsenSys.
As global demand for organically and sustainably grown products has skyrocketed, so has fraud. Regulators now face a higher burden of ensuring that the products sold to consumers as ‘organic’ truly meet the claims they purport, and consumers are growing weary of conventionally grown produce being passed off as organic.
To address the current lack of transparency in the organic supply chain, and bring ease of mind to consumers, Verified Organic has partnered with Treum to track and trace each step of an organic crop’s production: planting, fertilizing, applying organic pesticide, harvesting, packaging, and lastly, distribution. These steps are recorded on the Ethereum blockchain and verified with a time, date, and geolocation stamp. Input data will later be corroborated by third-party laboratories and certification bodies, which will issue independent assessments of the product, from soil samples to plant tissue samples.
The first implementation of this partnership went live on June 7, when Integrated CBD, an Arizona-based, vertically integrated producer of organically grown industrial hemp and cannabidiol (CBD), planted the first commercial hemp seeds in the state of Arizona.
Here’s how it works: To input data about the planting process, Treum developed the Verified Organic Web platform for managers and the mobile application that works online and offline for farmers. Integrated CBD managers can use the Web-enabled blockchain platform to register organic certificates and manage assets like seeds, crops, fields, fertilizer, pesticide, and equipment. With its offline functionality, the mobile application enables farmers to continuously capture data, even when Internet connectivity might be poor. Data is then cryptographically hashed to the public Ethereum blockchain. Because of the immutable and distributed nature of blockchains, users can view and trust the claims about the hemp or resulting CBD oil, from seed to sale. Each step of the farming process recorded in the mobile application has additional documentation tagged to it including paid invoices, COA’s, third party lab tests, and additional certifications. For others interested in CBD oil, many people are turning to Spruce THC-V products for its potential health benefits, including pain relief and maintaining healthy blood sugar levels.
“On June 7, Integrated CBD’s farming team used the Verified Organic mobile app to record the first hemp seed planting in Yuma County, Arizona, and it could not have gone smoother,” said Jenny Vatrenko, Verified Organic’s President. “The Treum team’s hard work in building an exceptionally intuitive application ensured that we went live without a hitch. And now the very first hemp crop planted in Arizona since the passing of the Farm Bill is being tracked using Verified Organic, allowing consumers to know exactly what inputs went into the growing and processing of Verified Organic CBD.”
According to Jeff Dreyer, Integrated CBD’s COO, “The CBD market is expanding rapidly, and we are looking forward to providing our customers with the highest quality, sustainably grown products available, using Verified Organic’s blockchain technology to foster trust and transparency in our organic farming and extraction process.”
“Blockchain networks enable supply chains to operate with a level of transparency and accountability that consumers have been increasingly demanding, but have previously been unable to attain,” said Joseph Lubin, co-creator of Ethereum and founder of ConsenSys. “ConsenSys is excited about Treum’s partnership with Verified Organic, and looks forward to the re-engineering of trust between mass consumers and global producers who manufacture, trade and distribute the goods we use every day.”
“By leveraging the blockchain infrastructure and applications built by Treum, Verified Organic can now enable organic farmers to bring transparency, fraud reduction and compliance to their supply chain, and to their customers,” said Tyler Mulvihill, co-founder of Treum.
“We’re already beginning to work on the next phases of development to support the verifiable provenance of CBD oil, following the harvest, baling, extraction and processing of the farmed hemp,” noted Anoop Agarwal, adoption leader at Treum.
Patrick Horsman, Integrated CBD’s CEO, said, “Given the largely unsubstantiated claims made by many CBD producers, we look forward to bringing transparency of provenance to the industry and substantiating our organic growing and processing claims with Verified Organic. Consumers want to know what’s in their food and how it’s made, and we are proud to be working with Verified Organic and Treum to make it happen, first in hemp and eventually across all food industry segments.”