South Australian food and wine tracing platform teams up with Hedera

The Australian government-backed agricultural supply chain platform Entrust has announced it will operate on Hedera Hashgraph — a distributed ledger platform claiming a transactional throughput of 10,000 transactions per second.

South Australia’s premier, Steven Marshall, officially launched Entrust on September 20, describing the platform’s initial focus as protecting the wine and dairy manufacturing industries from counterfeit fraud in the global markets, and driving efficiency savings across agricultural sectors.

Entrust is a software-as-a-service platform that tracks the movement of primary products (such as wine grapes) across the local agricultural supply chain, as well as the supply chain of the secondary manufactured products (in this case, the wine itself.)

Geolocation, time-stamping, and other key data is immutably recorded to Hedera Hashgraph, and is accessible via web browser or mobile application.

The beta platform is currently being trialed by more than a dozen companies based in South Australia’s Clare Valley wine region, and is tracking the movement of more than 250,000 liters of wine. The platform was co-founded by Grosset Wines’ Jeffrey Grosset, with the Australian government providing A$150,000 (roughly $109,000) to support the initiative.

Entrust's technical director, Rob Allen, praised Hedera’s scaling capabilities, predicting that the speed advantages of Hashgraph will allow Entrust to target other countries whose economies are reliant on exporting wine and other agricultural products.

“Australia produces almost 2 million tonnes of wine grapes each year. As winemakers see the benefits of securing their Wine Australia Label Integrity Program data on Entrust, it is important the system is fast, cost-effective, secure, and scalable.”

In late-August, the Australian Department of Industry announced that local working groups targeting the supply chain and credentialing sectors had been established to support Australia’s National Blockchain Roadmap Steering Committee.

Several blockchain-based supply chain traceability solutions have also established a foothold in Australia, with VeChain partnering with hundreds of Australian businesses in recent years, while the agricultural-focused platforms Aglive and BeefLedger have seen success targeting the local beef industry.

Hedera Hashgraph is also expanding its presence down-under, having launched a DLT-powered micropayments pilot with Australia’s leading point-of-sale technology provider Eftpos in July.