Antifraud solution for Food

About

European manufacturers suffer from counterfeiting in every field, without effective/affordable tools to fight back. We have developed a solution based in Blockchain to stop counterfeiting, with the following additional characteristics: • Identifies univocally and irreversibly each unit of the product as providing from a particular manufacturer, and to check for fake and 2nd quality product detection. Traceability is available. • Identifies whether the unit has been previously used or not (stopping counterfeiting, see below) • Allows for dynamic one-to-one marketing, manufacturer to the final consumer, for offers, discounts, enriched information, extreme personalization, without needing email or personal data, etc. • Protects the manufacturer against nonpayment or disloyalty from its distributors (Nuclear Button) • Facilitates the recall of products, even already sold and out of the shelves (e.g. food health alerts) • Works with regular smartphones, without special apps, for ultra-fast adoption. • Super-affordable price, of just cents. Deployment time, 2 weeks currently (zero-days in the near future). No infrastructure required. Specially designed for SME needs and capabilities. • We are currently selling this solution (SaaS model) to producers and manufacturers. We are specialists in processing massive quantities of data (as in FMCG) in public, dependable Blockchains, at ultra-low costs. We are focused on fraud and consumer bonding and insight. This data may be analyzed with AI tools and techniques to detect trends and anomalies. ----> E.g. you are having dinner in a restaurant and order a bottle of wine. You see a double-layer BlockTac label; you peel it and a unique, signed QR appears. You point your iPhone to it and the iPhone goes directly to a page with info about the product, where you may check against blockchain whether the product is original and has never opened (checked) before. The manufacturer (only him) may inject additional info at this moment for this unit of product (text, video, any choice). If the bottle was opened before (fraud!), you get a warning and an offer to denounce it (sure, you also complain to the waiter!) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This system breaks down the economic schema of counterfeiting: when a fraudster copies a product, he makes hundreds or thousands of copies, with the same QR; once one is checked, all others are marked as fakes. Counterfeiting becomes riskier. As a shop owner, you won’t take the risk of buying from a dubious origin in the future (your customers would detect it). We have developed a system that helps the manufacturer to make their products unfakeable, by using blockchain technology: it involves an IT batch (also available as API/immediate) system to prepare a unique id for each unit, sign them with the private key of the manufacturer, store them in an unmodifiable, unfakeable blockchain (Ethereum), print the id in the form of a QR in a multi-layer sticker (NFC also possible), and use the regular smartphones from the consumers (without apps) to check that the units are original, were prepared by our customers, and have not been opened before. The detailed steps are: 1. We assign to each unit a different QR/NFC that links the unit with a register in Ethereum blockchain, that by design is unforgeable, and resides in more than 30.000 computers around the world. The registers are signed with a private key from the producer. (QR is inside the box, or in a multilayer sticker -you have to peel it off). We use Python, Javascript, Solidity over Ubuntu and MongoDB 2. Any consumer with a smartphone, without neither dedicated Apps nor cryptocurrencies, may check the QR against the digital copy on Ethereum. Once checked, the Ethereum register is marked as “broken”. We use HTML/CSS/Javascript/Solidity plus dedicated servers in Flask/Apache 3. If a fraudster copies the olive oil bottle, he will copy everything, including the QR. And he will make hundreds, thousands or more bottles (it wouldn’t have an economic sense if not). If somebody checks the seal again, it would be identified against Ethereum as “broken”, offering the possibility to denounce it to the manufacturer or authorities 4. Do notice that the first bottle checked breaks the seal. So, all the batch from the fraudster is marked as “fake”. Shops selling the oil will identify them and refuse to deal with the fraudster. Customers will be fully aware. We are breaking the economic sense of the counterfeiting, making it too risky from an economic point of view. 5. The system is already developed and has early adopters (and 3.5M Digital Seals commands). In addition to these characteristics, and as a result with the interaction with real customers in the previous Horizon 2020 phase 1, we have added the following three useful characteristics that make our “Digital Seals” really special: 1. The unique QR/NFC points to a unique certificate register that is signed by the manufacturer. This certificate contains all the text, images, and info to check its validity against the information contained in its Ethereum transaction. But it also contains the address of a special webpage residing in the manufacturer site with additional info related to that unique unit of product: more images, videos, sounds, offers, discounts, even form to contact. That allows for two things in the Marketing area: a. One-to-one marketing, putting directly in contact the manufacturer with its customers, allowing different offers and campaigns depending on whatever the manufacturer needs (time, geographical positioning -while based on IP address is even GDPR-“ready”, number of scanning of labels in the area, etc.) b. Hyper-Customization for the product, as some customers have asked for. Just two real examples: (1) Some high-priced Olive Oils (ranged in the hundred €) are prepared, signed and coupled with images from the customer experience tasting it (it is a unique Bottle for that particular Customer; now do extrapolate the concept to other clothing, wine… industries -this is extremely well suited for low-production SMEs). And (2), a QR in a drug box can be coupled with the particular prescription for a patient at home (ideal for aging people, which frequently forget their intended medication prescription); just pointing the box the personalized, blockchain-protected prescription appears. 2. Protection of the manufacturer against nonpayment or disloyalty from its distributors. Same old story: a manufacturer sells his product, and he is promised to be paid later (but unfortunately, sometimes are not). In other cases, goods that are intended for one country are found in another country (parallel imports). In these cases, the manufacturer has not so many ways to fight against (even legal sues are expensive or ineffective depending on the country). Now, he has a new weapon: he may mark the lot of products sold to that disloyal distributor, and change the message showed when the final customer is checking the QR/Blockchain (“Fake product”, “Non-legal unit”, “Contact us urgently”, “Not a product from us”, whatever). Just a bunch of customers with these messages complaining to the retailers about these messages, and the retailers no doubt are going to get uncomfortable dealing with the cheating distributor in the future. This is called by our customers the “Nuclear Button”. 3. Facilitates the recall of products, even already sold and out of the shelves (e.g. food alerts). Final customers are not well aware of (e.g.) Food Alerts or Drug Alerts and consume unsafe products even after their intended recall from the health safety institutions. When they are aware of the food alert (e.g. though TV), they cannot tell out the safe from the unsafe food (as in the case of the last pork food scandals in Spain, or the horsemeat scandal ) and respond eliminating whole lines of products from their diet (and so punishing legal, safe producers because of the faults of a bunch of illegal producers). In many cases, even the Health Institutions don’t know who has bought the food or drugs, or where the products are. Our solution allows us to include special messages for these cases (“Do not consume”, “This food is safe”, … even including images of health certificates or additional info). It is worth to notice that only the Manufacturer may introduce this variable info in the website, signed and secured by the same keys pointed in the blockchain certificate, which in turn in secured by an unmodifiable, unfakeable transaction hash stored in a public multi-thousand-nodes Ethereum blockchain. Any change or hack is detected and marked. Again, Blockchain is the key to add confidence and security to the system. The deployment of the system is based, on one side, on the Ethereum infrastructure already available; on another side, on a database (MongoDB) which may be in our servers in the cloud, or on dedicated VPS on the Manufacturer’s side; and finally one or more checkers (VPS running simple checkers of the validity of the certificates, Apache/Flask) that may be ours, or run on dedicated VPS in the Manufacturer’s side. Deployment in the case that the Manufacturer requires VPS for databases and/or checkers is based on Docker/Kubernetes, guaranteeing tremendous scalability and immediateness. The system described so far is functional. We are actively selling this product.