The National Pork Board, Des Moines, Iowa, partnered with Ripe Technology, Inc., San Francisco, to pilot blockchain technology use in the U.S. pork industry.  

Through this partnership, ripe.io will enable an ecosystem that allows pork producers to monitor, evaluate and continuously improve their sustainability practices based on the We Care framework, which consists of six defined ethical principles guiding the U.S. pork industry.

“The growing demand across the entire food supply chain, including end consumers, is to ‘know your food.’ The ripe.io platform generates powerful levels of transparency and trust by enabling collaboration and consensus of data and activities within food systems,” says Raja Ramachandran, co-founder of ripe.io. “Through blockchain, customers like the National Pork Board can enable its organization and members to create shared, immutable trusted records that address critical food issues such as sustainability, quality, traceability, waste and fraud.”

Working with ripe.io, the National Pork Board will consolidate sustainability data and activities gathered on the ripe.io platform and highlight how pork producers create a sustainable pork production environment. In addition, through a distributed permissioned ledger, this program data can be visible to partners in the ecosystem to ensure valid certifications. The data remains anonymous in order to create a benchmark indicator for each ethical principle.

“Over the last 50 years, America’s pig farmers have followed the We Care principles to produce a product that has become increasingly sustainable using 75% less land, 25% less water and 7% less energy,” says Dr. Brett Kaysen, assistant vice president of sustainability at the National Pork Board. “We look forward to working with ripe.io to use blockchain technology to record proof points through a system that can benchmark performance while increasing transparency of the entire pork value chain.”