The acceleration of a venture to provide food safety compliance solutions to the local supply chain through the use of technology-enabled methods.
Lebanon’s 2019-2021 economic depression has made it urgent for action on two fronts to ensure better and improved food security. First, we need to increase production of a variety of food products that substitute for imports to reduce Lebanon’s dependence on imported foodstuffs. Second, we need to encourage and expand the production of exports, especially food products, in order generate precious fresh foreign exchange the economy needs to grow. A key ingredient of both of is adequate food safety in the supply chain. Yet the Lebanon’s infrastructure in the domain of food safety certification and standards compliance is very weak if non-existent. This is a timely opportunity, as the new businesses and existing companies begin to produce internationally competitive products, to boost the safety and standard compliance through new and modern technology-enabled methods.
According to FDA and FAO the new smart approaches to food safety rely on two key elements: technology-enabled traceability and new business model/retail modernization. These smart approaches to food safety, leverage technology to create a more digital, and traceable food system that facilitates enhanced food safety and standards compliance. This smarter food safety approach is about more than just technology. It is also about simpler, more effective, and modern farm-to-fork business models, approaches and processes.
The new digital technologies including blockchain and other analytics tools can be of help here to provide a smart platform to facilitate this transition for the Lebanese agri-food industry to become more internationally competitive with enhanced food safety traceability.
Given the above context, this project will develop a blueprint/prototype/minimum viable product that would employ the abovementioned smart approach to food safety traceability. It is envisioned that a new organization, ideally a startup or a new venture, can develop this idea over the next few years and grow to become market-based platform to enhance food safety traceability via blockchain technologies. It is expected that the successful growth of this startup can also encourage the development and entry of other safety and compliance ecosystem players to further support the Lebanese agri-food industry as it evolves and becomes more internationally competitive as more food imports are replaced with domestic production and as greater amount of food products are exported.
Challenges
Challenges
The project is expected to require Primary Customer Research and Secondary Technical Research to develop and evaluate the technical and business viability of the blockchain agri-food traceability platform via the following tasks/activities:
(a) identify a target area of focus for initial intervention in the agri-food market for initial version of the platform.
(b) development of high-level platform design using blockchain/data analytics technologies.
(c) development of a complete “use case” A-to-Z for a food safety traceability process;
(d) problem-solution validation of the use case.
(e) value proposition, and market segment identification (personas of customers and associated value proposition based on primary market research).
(f) market sizing of the business opportunity.
(g) pricing and revenue model development.
(h) costs/resources/partnership model.
(i) minimum viable product design including blockchain specification;
(j) product-market fit assessment.
(k) investor pitch deck development.
