Blockchain to Support Sustainable Supply Chains

[Music] hello and welcome back we have an exciting session ahead of us looking forward to learning how blockchain can play a role in sustainable supply chain so a quick run of applause to our speakers alberto you'll be moderating the the session so welcome you all to the stage thank you thanks everybody thanks uh uh for the attendance uh of this uh panel uh i'd like to start this panel with uh quick introduction um i'm gonna use like the order i'm gonna use is what i see on my screen starting with uh gehan's first if you could uh quickly introduce yourself to the audience and speak a little bit about uh your work in blockchain at kaisebook hello everyone thanks for attending i'm yaron susterno i'm leading a blockchain blockchain program for careful careful is a french retail company with a long-standing commitment in food transition and becoming a digital retail company we started using blockchain in 2018 for food traceability purposes thank you guys uh duncan yes hi good afternoon everybody um so duncan johnston what i'm co-founder and ceo of btp uh blockchain technology partners so we're an enterprise blockchain company and really our focus is on providing a platform to enable many different uh business use cases um the focus for us being on multi-party innovation and so supply chain is a classic multi-party problem uh and so looking forward to the conversation here great thank you daniela hi good morning good afternoon good evening everyone i'm daniela barbosa i'm the executive director of the hyperledger foundation and it is a delight to be here today at the european blockchain convention i want to thank actually victoria and daniel and the rest of the team for such a great event um that i've been watching the sessions um and the panelists here today for for joining me as well hyperledger foundation for those of you who don't know we're an open source consortium of companies we really make up are made up of three parts one is our open source developer community which is really at the core of what the hyper hyperledger foundation is focused on their developers that might come from small companies or large companies academics and other types of organizations come together to work on code in the common uh governance open governance model that is under the hyperledger foundation and technical steering committee um our goal is really to continue to build um those communities within the hyperledger foundation there are now 18 different projects many of them that the the people here on the panelists have spoken about and obviously sustainability and supply chain has been a big use case so i'm really looking forward uh today to today's conversation so thank you amazing thank you daniella pedro thank you uh uh hello everyone pedro lopez i'm blockchain lead at richmond with my luxury group focused on the different luxury groups on different luxury products and you know i work since a few years on different blockchain initiatives trying to tackle different aspects both on the upstream and downstream parts so happy to be here thank you very much again to the organization and looking forward to the conversation with with all of you thank you so much pedro and a quick introduction about myself i'm alberta coser i am with nestle the swiss-based food and beverage company and i have been part of our blockchain journey for the last uh six years where we leverage blockchain mainly for uh supply chain and and some and traceability of some of our products uh but i am a blockchain aficionado uh for many many years uh very soon it's uh it's i would never imagine i would say that we're going to be a deck in coming in in maybe a couple of years but uh blockchain has grown so much from its inception and its beginnings uh and and the possibilities are endless what we are seeing ahead of us is uh is really just the dawn of a new era uh when it comes to how things uh get interconnected through blockchain and i'd like to start our conversation today uh with uh doing we we've had a very similar panel last year and uh some of the panelists that participated with me last year are here um and uh i'd like to start with a reflection of what has changed from last year to this year especially when it comes to supply chain and and because of the pandemic that we're still going through uh and i just heard uh yesterday there was an interview on tv of a doctor saying we're halfway through the pandemic right so which uh didn't make me very happy hearing that but let's say we're halfway through the pandemic from the beginning of the pandemic to now supply chain has suffered a lot and there were a lot of possibilities for blockchain and how blockchain could have helped what we talked last year was more about adoption and how adoption was too shy in many organizations especially large enterprise uh companies were still trying out blockchain what the possibilities were uh what blockchain could bring to the business what has changed from then to now and i'd like to start with you guys thanks um since last year we are continuing expanding as a blockchain program we have now a blockchain in each one of our nine countries of careful we have new products launched we have [Music] we have a textile traceability with blockchain which is new we have about 14 products under blockchain which means more than a thousand reference with every batch traced and traceability available in our stores we are also expanding the blockchain we have with new suppliers providing the same products and we had some invitation or new relationship with cpgs or industrials who wants to join the blockchain and to build a blockchain with us which is uh from my point of view a good signal of the brand uh using the power of blockchain to to communicate on their good practices for the moment we are still focusing on our main use case which is a transparency on the traceability because it's what our consumer is looking for when you go to careful store you go to buy some products and with the pandemic you said so you want to know where the product comes from who produced it and i have there a producer and it's not for for nothing it's very important both for careful and for the consumer to to get to know uh the the history and the way the product was produced so that's our our main use case however as you said um the greatest deck doesn't make it all so we also working on the adoption and the visibility of the product with blockchain in our store so the consumer doesn't pass it and benefit it all the way around with packaging with visibility of the qr codes and so on great thanks for your updates uh guys and uh duncan uh i'd like to hear from you a little bit i know you haven't participated in the panel last year uh but i'd like to get your your take on uh what what do you feel changed in the in blockchain uh in the last one year um how long do you have uh it i guess i mean there's um the way the way we look at it uh and obviously we're really providing a platform to enable businesses to explore new and interesting use cases and i think you know what we're seeing is provenance has always been important and provenance clearly is the underlying kind of underlies product traceability and and also transfer of ownership uh in many many different fields so i guess you know we see that as if you like uh distilling that uh and and that being a foundational concept that can apply across uh not just multiple industries but uh but uh but also even within uh supply chain it's not just around food um we're seeing a lot of interest uh particularly around uh um things like cobalt and that being a foundational concept that can apply across um and uh and and so in that context um there's a there's a company remember the hyperledger foundation i'm police saying i've been involved with them for many years and there's a fellow member called circulor that's you know very famous now for its work uh looking at the sort of whole uh supply chain around ev so uh and the battery industry and and to to follow up on on on garand's point um a lot of this is driven by consumers you know uh wanting to know that when they you know where where how was this car built if it's a car that i'm looking at yeah where did where did we source those components and i think so what we're seeing is is you know increasing drive uh from the consumer end uh uh that that's probably just gonna keep keep keep going so i'll stop there but that that's certainly for us one of the the major observations we would make amazing amazing insights thank you daniela like to hear from you what's your opinion excellent well i wasn't on the panel last year but i did watch it um and you know one thing that delights us when we see people like nestle and kyra four and richmond talking about real products right in production real blockchain use cases that are reaching the consumer so i think more of those stories and more of those lessons learned that were coming out at events like this and other types of workshops um is really different right because a few years ago maybe it was just a point a poc or you know a small pilot somewhere within the organization and now we're seeing you know very large retail companies i'm actually implementing um and building these networks out which so i think it's quite different and i'm sure all of you on the panel today can actually talk about you know the scalability of these if you look at the um industry in general um you know what what we see and what the industry sees is the blockchain adoption there was a deloitte 2021 global blockchain survey recently that you know came out i think in the in the early spring um and about 81 of the technologists and executives that were surveyed said that the technology is now scalable right and it has achieved mainstream adoption and that is important right so when you have the executive level uh support at these big companies it's no longer just a small group in r d trying to experiment and you know trying to really understand the technology um it really changes the implement the implementations and kind of the momentum of these projects you know i'll echo what graduates and duncan said also is on the consumer side um there was a a a an accenture survey they came out i think it was summer of 2020 right in the in the middle of covid don't say we're in the middle of it now but in the middle of the first wave of covet that said that you know 45 of the consumers were more interested in buying things that they can track in in the sustainably that they could buy something that they have said this has been sustainably produced and delivered through the supply chain so i think that's what's changing is i think at the top level of these companies um executives are understanding that the technology is scalable that it's real and it's providing you know return on investment um it's not you know cheap and easy to do but there is a return on investment that's a long-term strategy um and then at the consumer levels that's consumer levels consumers are demanding it and there's also regulation which i'm sure we'll talk a little bit later there's regulatory requirements so when you see those three things kind of come together right in hyperledger foundation we've been here for six years we've been at this for a long time when you start seeing that you start seeing the maturation of the market and of the technology and of you know developers and engineering teams at you know at large companies like yourselves who um are bringing these solutions forward so it's very exciting uh to be here um and the other the other the other pointer we talked about this when we did our prep is you're not seeing um news articles every single day so and so company has a blockchain a blockchain a blockchain right these are you know uh projects that sometimes it's even hard for us here at the hyperledger foundation to find out who's building using you know hyperledger technology because it's not a hype these you know no one talks about the oracle database that's running our data our you know website right we talk about uh what the the website actually does in this scenario so it's very exciting to be here you know the our hyperledger foundation community you know uh folks like duncan and others who've been supporting us for the last six years um are you know seeing the fruits of our labor which is fantastic to see amazing great uh pedro what what's your take i don't know if there is anything else to uh to say yeah i think i think in in the last uh six months since uh since our last conversation what uh i've seen is an acceleration uh and it's an acceleration driven by the consumers i i very much relate to uh to what you just said daniella i think it's uh you know straight to the to the point i think there is a consumer demand and this is driving everything else because at the end of the day you know all companies even those companies that uh work on the b2b uh business eventually are driven by by uh consumer needs and and you know by consumer trends so in in terms of uh sustainability i think along with nfts if if i can mention that those would be if you if you ask me what are the the hot topics of this year uh now that we are almost closing it i would say those those are the two ones nft is on one side and here we are to speak about sustainability that's uh the other topic i think the conversation is is intensifying and the consumers are more and more careful about what they buy and and companies have uh you know now is not a question of if it's important or not if if companies are not taking care uh of their uh sustainability or their supply chain or of uh you know acting responsible there is a high risk of being out so the action is here we are taking actions all of us in order to move towards you know more transparent and more comprehensive uh supply chain and um i i would add the you know if if i may uh now that i opened the the nft topic um that in the future if i can open the you know the the point we need to start also uh thinking not only about the supply chain with physical goods but also with the italian goods and it's something i think that is starting to happen now you know after i i think after each wave of of a new innovation or a new thing you know we have to hype everyone starts focusing on on on this hype trying to understand trying to see if it fits in their strategy but after that passes and and whatever topic is confirmed i think companies and and i think it's happening today with nfts start thinking okay but how can we tackle this in the in the long term okay and i think there is going to be a a mix a match between traditional supply chains and new ways or new supply chains that are going to uh to be established after this you know digital and web 3 revolution great thank you my uh my my thoughts on that compared when i look at what happened in the last uh 12 months since we talked last last year is that if if in supply chain uh we were you know barely scratching the surface of the possibilities and and sometimes many companies trying and being shy in adoption because we had the perception of blockchain more of a a repository for data and now we're starting to see true value uh and and uh the one thing you mentioned the nfts i i think more than what nfts uh the the most important part that nft is brought for us is is truly the making tokenization sort of a a common thing in in blockchain and it opens up the doors of possibilities for uh for blockchain and how you can bring value to consumers through blockchain uh when we talk about consumers grants i think we talked before about uh the challenges we have for regular consumers to spot blockchain uh at least i think that might have been the the experience of kaifur uh we have a little bit of that as well uh you can always interact with blockchain through a qr code uh but but can you talk a little bit more about this and what carifu has been doing uh to to make sure that not only consumers spot where blockchain is but also see the value and why they should interact with blockchain yes uh what we are doing is uh harmonizing the the consumer interface as a consumer can see when they scan our career code so they have a common experiment when they're scanning all of uh the 40 products we have now in blockchain um will it be some sheets will it be some fresh product in france in spain and so on they have the same experiments and they have now more modern uh more neat and clear information so we are building our own standards in the blockchain that's important for the consumers that's also important for us because it helps us in the industrialization of our blockchain building it make it um easier for us it makes it uh more clear for the consumer it's making it more easy for the producer to join and that's important and we we hope that help also the interoperability of our blockchain and that's a good point uh in a concrete way we change the packaging so the consumer can spot the cure easily and if we go through the store we're making some some signature in the stores and in the e-commerce um website of careful so the consumer can spot it and being there with you today is also a way to let know to the consumer that they can join and they can have access to the data uh maybe the last thing we can do is important of the network um with the consumer with our store but also with ibm for instance who's our partner to to build the blockchain and we can have some contact with you of of course with a business but also with with um other companies that want to to make blockchain stand out to make blockchain adoption uh easier in worldwide i can't hear you alberto i guess you're young all right i wasn't mute uh thank you guys uh there's an interesting thing in what you said is uh um you know something that reminds me the importance of connecting blockchain is a fabric so you're connecting the information that we add on the blockchain for our products and once this products get on your shelves you add your information to that and that's really what helps drive value to the consumers um duncan um i would like to start with one of the questions from the audience uh for for you uh we have uh quite a few popping up here uh there's one and then i'll start with duncan because this is the next on my on my on my roster here but it's the application of blockchain in your supply chain driving costs or do you see in in your case do you see based on your experience the application of blockchain uh driving cost reduction uh if it's driving cost reduction in in which way have you seen that if it is not uh why we have the same costs uh or those are growing due to blockchain how you see this like blockchain and and cost in in supply chain all right well i guess the first thing i would say is we need to be careful when we talk about blockchain that we're talking i think all of us around a permissioned blockchain we're not talking about public blockchain we're not talking about uh um you know uh ethereum or or bitcoin and and and proof of work so so you know there is there is you know no intrinsic overhead of using blockchain i would say um in terms of its benefits i think uh improved transparency obviously is one but i think also in general uh there's a challenge when you're dealing with multi-party complex sort of multi-company multi-party interactions uh to ensure that there is you know both efficiency and trustworthiness so so that you can rely on on on what is happening across a supply chain or across any complex uh transfer of ownership um uh um and so in in that scenario i think you know what blockchain is providing us with is is both improved or enhanced uh efficiency because largely it is automated it's governed very often by smart contracts which i hope we talk about a little bit so we we move up from you know the blockchain is really just the distributed ledger at the end of the day but it's it's what's running on it that's way more interesting i would say and so so smart contracts are a way of automating business logic um and the fact that you are using a dlt gives you that that guarantee of of immutability and and ensures or assures everyone that you know the data is the data and not some uh some rather pernicious or even accidental uh uh uh change to that data so i think you know it's it's almost like i mean we would say um and of course you know blockchain the lt has been around us we all agree for almost a decade now um uh but you know the at the end of the day um what it is providing is is ultimately an enabler an enabler it's something that's enabling new ways of doing business um or or better ways of doing business and you know we are not islands none of us it doesn't matter whether it's b2b or b2c or b2b to see you know whether we're doing this as an individual or whether we're doing this you know within a sort of a business context um you know we are uh we are in inter in interoperating the whole time and whether we're doing that tech yeah at a technology level at a standards level at the end of the day you know we are you know hyper connected these days so so i think you know it's that that's where it will really score in the long run i think and and as daniella was saying you know we are solving we haven't solved every single challenge but we are solving issues around scalability and so on so you know and and provided we do that without sacrificing the fundamental value prop of of the underlying dlt then i think we're in a good place um final comment i would make just in terms of what pedro was saying is you know it's what we can learn from you know what we can distill and learn from supply chain is really uh is is really important because then it can be applied uh in in other domains so so you know it's it's become i think a great proving ground for a lot of new thinking and so now it's a question you know i study maths uh many or math as they say in the u.s many years ago and um you know one of the things you're always looking for is to generalize and come up with things that can be applied across multiple domains um and i think supply chain is giving us that so it's taught us a lot about provenance and now we can apply that to nfts or we can apply it to many many different uh areas i feel thank you duncan you you touched uh one of my favorite topics in blockchain that's a smart contract that's for sure we'll come back to that topic uh i think that's uh you know as as you you know beautifully put together is a smart contracts drive automation that helps drive value and the blockchain daniela um we we use some of us here i don't know maybe all of us here we are uh we're leveraging hyperledger right in some of our blockchain solutions uh what what do you see as uh in terms of like still on the on the question of cost uh because certainly the the adoption of hyper ledger ended up bringing a cost in terms of sending it up and and i can i can speak for uh my own experience that costs at the end of the day it's negligible uh you know it's very small on on what we're doing it doesn't get really translated into uh the cost uh to the consumers at the end of the day and and we see the value you know in terms of uh helping uh with promotion of some products kind of offsetting that cost is that your experience when you see other uh other companies adopting uh specifically hyper ledger as well so um well to clarify i think the three of you uh nestle uh and car for yeah uh hyperledger fabric is the platform is the dlt that you have so a couple of points on on that um obviously you know for six years ago hyperledger was a hyperledger fabric and then we had hyperledger sawtooth also used very often duncan's quite familiar with it in supply chain use cases um so and one of the things that has happened over the last six years and even more so in the last two years is here at hyperledger foundation we've increased the amount of product projects not because they're increasing in you know we want you know many of the same but in in different requirements so for example if you think about requirements around interoperability we have a project called hyperledger cactus that is addressing interoperability between networks which becomes a requirement as you scale out these networks right or a network of one is no fun um so we here at hyperledger foundation have actually also expanded what type of open source projects we've brought into the foundation to serve the needs of these very different um projects one of the things that on the coast on the cost question so you know obviously hyperledger is open source so hyperledger all our projects are apache license it's free you can download it you can build your billion dollar business on it you're never going to have to pay a license fee but there is a cost to partnering with a technology provider with a vendor that you're working with and those costs are just typical of enterprise software um you know i i will ask the questions of those of you on the panel here is how many systems does your current blockchain dlt right your fabric implementation how many systems in the enterprise does it touch how many integration points do you have to make for that data that is on the blockchain to interact and to provide the products and services that you want to provide to your suppliers downstream and to your consumers as well right there this is enterprise software is its best right it's very very very large to see so the cost of of doing enterprise uh software deployment um is pretty anonymous to that on the open source front you know i always use the analogy of you know open source is um it's uh it's like a free puppy you you get a puppy someone gives you a free puppy and then what happens uh you have to nurture it you have to you know buy it stuff you have to implement it you have to train it um so um you know costs associated with using open source um is obviously you know the point there the other thing is that we also have built a very large commercial ecosystem supporting this so when you have code when you're building products on open source code you want to have a commercial ecosystem that can support you you want to have experts that can provide support to develop on top of that dlt platform so really when you think about implementing blockchain and what the costs are it is enterprise software right um it is probably as a big company you're going to need partners and vendors to come and help you with and experts but we always recommend bringing in core people on your teams um upscaling them so that they understand the subject of smart contracts right if you don't understand some smart contracts you don't understand you know verifiable credentials or any of the other techniques from a dlt perspective a blockchain perspective um you're going to have to constantly go outside so you know the recommendation is and i think the the panelists here have all done this at these big companies is putting together engineering teams in house that understand the technology and building that common um knowledge that you can build and that's going to save you a lot of money in the long term because you will become experts in running these networks um and then you're able to in your um in your ecosystem right your networks the companies that you work with one another the companies and the partners that you want to bring into your networks um you're able to educate the market as you go along um so you know core message is it's enterprise software it's expensive it's long it takes a long time right an erp system when you're implementing a new erp system for example it's not going to take you you know six months and you're ready to go um so i i hopefully that answers the question um a little bit from our perspective it does thank you there is one thought from from what you said that just occurred to me you're saying it's an investment you gotta invest on building expertise and building know-how and and that reminds me of like when companies started to connect their internal network and systems to the internet uh you know many companies saw that as a pure cost because there was limited value out of that connection and and today we see that the companies that were faster at building that know-how they gained a competitive advantage that put them up front and when you we we talked about digital transformation and and the revolution that is ahead of us in 10 years from today the companies they're investing right now in building that expertise that know how in blockchain are the companies that will take advantage of the decentralized apps of large-scale tokenization and and a number of other benefits smart contracts automation through blockchain uh and and so on and so forth so that's that's a very interesting thought federal i'd like to bring to you the discussion of tokens again there's a there's a couple of questions from the audience on tokenization uh and the first question is is tokenization a key in the supply chain in order to have all data involved in the shipping if so how is going to be applied and i'm i'm going to give you one hint one of one of the things that many companies are investigating when it comes to because we're talking about sustainability as well uh tokenization helps with sustainability because you can have smart contracts on the blockchain that you give a benefit to consumers by just engaging with the blockchain you can exchange tokens that will offset carbon footprint for example or tokens that will help with uh clean water resources in uh in another part of the planet that you might never visit yourself so how you see tokenization uh in in supply chain and uh what are the the lessons that we have uh that you have learned in your experience well i think tokenization is uh is key right we we always see tokenization for consumer goods or you know in in you know uh downstream business cases directly related to the to the consumers but when it comes to uh to the upper stream to the supply chain i think is essential first because what you say you can [Music] use and leverage smart contracts not only associated with you know the the products you are producing but with with the materials that you are using with with the production process with a lot of things and for example automate the carbon offsetting or if eventually you are going to provide this information to the to your consumer create different different processes to ensure for example that the the material you know in in in manufacturing sometimes you buy materials for a new project and then is used for another project because for this project it's not arriving on time and you just take something that you uh you had in your in your stock so to orchestrate all these elements to really um your manufacturing process and and you know to to ensure even data continuity uh you can leverage all these elements uh uh through tokenization and i think uh i i very much uh agree with again with what daniela just said um i think it's essential to build internal knowledge uh you know everything when you you when you're working in the enterprise world everything is a cost right everything it's uh it's especially these days uh where where we have become more competitive and we need to reduce cost uh we need to uh to uh to make everything faster and cheaper uh we're looking on every uh every euro pound dollar or swiss franc that we spend right and um i i think uh it's very important to uh to build this knowledge i agree is going to create a competitive advantage we can we have an amazon for example a very simple and i think the main reason is because the best way to learn uh is by doing you know it's uh very nice to uh to read books even to you know listen to others speaking in in a conference uh hopefully that's nice in this case but the best way that you can learn is by doing and the best way that you can build competence is by doing and i think the smart contract what what you just said before the smart contract is is is very unknown and is very complex and it has a lot of possibilities and only when you start working with them you can start envisioning the the possibilities and and the power that that they have and and they really unleash uh a lot of automation that you can leverage you can make your your processes way more efficient and even simplify greatly your technical landscape just by leveraging on on a blockchain and and some well implemented smart contracts you know can i jump in because i think of course i don't want people to think that you have to have every skill set in-house because that would be like saying i'm in my office i need to know how the plumbing works i need to know how the aircon works i mean there's a balance here and i think pedro you you fortunately steered us in the right direction because it sounded from what you were saying daniella you need to know everything about everything in that stack well no that's crazy because uh what you do need is the ability to build knowledge at the right level and that is i think at the level of things like smart contracts because that's where you're meeting or bridging the gap between the platform and the business and and the language enables that because it doesn't tie you to the underlying implementation the whole point about smart contracts is is you know they will run on what they will run on but it's the contract that you care about so so i would i would sort of qualify what was being said a few minutes ago by saying you know the role of i'm not a nestle or a car for or a richmond or a walmart uh you know we're we're a technology company providing uh tools to enable people to not have to you know spend their entire life trying to stand up networks trying to stand up uh you know dlts and so on and so forth and it's interesting uh to danielle's point that hyperledger bevel was announced just uh two days ago which is is now an initiative within the uh within the hyperledger foundation that is also helping with the management operations side of the house so so yeah it's it's building uh building up know-how and expertise but making sure that when you learn by doing you're not learning plumbing you're learning you know how to capture your business uh and and improve that so sorry i had to say that because otherwise you know i think very well just just just to just to point out i i totally agree with you i i don't my my point was not to say you know your company needs to be the internal team and doing them by themselves because if each company needs to be there and build an internal team on any innovation subject that comes up you know uh we will need probably five times the people that that we are on each company so when i mean build internal knowledge is that i i actually see the opposite many companies they don't build any knowledge and even if in our case we're working with partners right and um but still we have as a small force that is learning about that because in my opinion that's the way we we companies can rely on on partners but at the same time we can steer those partners in and really point them out to the to the direction we really want that's uh banking it's the same thing right you know the risk model is what you care about and your risk models can be different from my risk model and so on and so forth but how you actually run that risk model it's just middleware you know exactly sorry no that's that's very well put and uh i was gonna say sometimes we have uh companies there bitcoin uh sorry not bitcoin uh blockchain uh that that's the common mistake a lot of people conflate uh bitcoin with blockchain but uh blockchain uh you have blockchain consultants or companies they're uh specialized in blockchain and they come to present uh solutions and if if the internal teams are not prepared to hear and understand what they have to say it's an and uh it's more more more often than not that i see uh you know companies uh presenting blockchain to to large enterprises and and people don't really understand what they're saying and they they fail to really uh see the future uh there's a question for garen's here uh are you using blockchain only with high added value goods or also with more expensive ones um we're using it with all range of food products we do not sell very expensive products we have uh the so maybe most expensive product we have is meat um but it's important product and it's um maybe some products with consumer um requirements and consumer um [Music] interrogation not to say anxiety we have to answer to so we have some cheap or basic product we have some tomato we have some oranges we have some meat we have some fish we have one bottle of wine about five or six euros a bottle it's not very expensive product because it's not what we do and we truly believe that quality and transparency is for everybody so we didn't started with very premium product we started with average range product with our private label brand now we're going with some organic products but it's not the first thing we address because we truly believe it's for everybody and when we have uh traceability uh in all our countries it's not just for french consumer it's also all for roman polish argentina uh consumer because everyone deserves it okay did you do what you got no no i was also thinking about uh permission blockchain and the sustainable uh costs of blockchain because it's something we we often heard and we wanted to to highlight that we um build it uh first in-house as you said to build our knowledge and then we we turned with um with uh ibm partnership but um we carefully built it at the beginning and we carefully uh developed it now with a permission blockchain and with an attention to the way we mine and the way we we are using blockchain but because it's too silly to spoil all the effect or the benefits of of transparency and good practicing in agriculture um ways with a bad development from a tech level so so it's really important to have this internal knowledge as you said and i totally agree with you uh to focus on what is more important for our consumer and who knows our consumer better than ourselves great uh there's one question uh i would like to bounce this to both uh duncan and daniella perhaps starting with danielle and then duncan that it's about what duncan said that we're using a permission-based blockchain that is true uh the three companies are here we're using a permission based blockchain among others we also have some initiatives and at least i can speak for me we have some initiatives in public blockchains as well as we test the waters and we understand what drives battery value for our consumers uh but daniella can you start uh talking a little bit more about this there's like permission based blockchain so it's a private blockchain and interesting i would like to know more about how that user journey begins what if does the user client need a to provide to be part of the blockchain uh so how you connect this right uh people confuse that just because we're using a a permission or private blockchain uh which i translate that as not being ethereum or bitcoin uh then uh the the consumer cannot connect to that blockchain which is not right can you can you speak more from the hyperledger foundation point of view how to clarify that question because that question happens uh more more often uh i see that very often well you know the basics is you know a permission blockchain so you you ha you are on a network um you are permission to become part of that network um so that consortium right has governance that is very specific to that network um it is of known entity so you understand who's who's part of that network they have rights associated with it in hyperledger fabric for example there is a channels so that this the specific participants within that blockchain network can communicate via the channels uh without um you know showing the data right so if nestle and carrefour is do are doing um exchanges of products um you don't have to display the prices and the quality in the quantity or anything um to everyone on the network right you just they just need to know that maybe that transaction between the two parties came in the world of permissioned and permissionalists that um that it's really changing you know what it was six years ago versus what it is today around using permission networks and permissionless networks so actually you know using the ethereum mainnet for example we have a project here at hyperledger called hyperledger bezu which is an ethereum client and you can run that either as a permissioned private network or into the mainnet as a public network as well and we're seeing hybrid use cases across uh the you know the board absolutely and i'll let um duncan address this because he's certainly there in the front lines with customers uh doing that as well and then if i can just before going into that very quickly talking about high value goods and i think uh pedro maybe you can talk to this as well we're seeing you know supply chain uh use cases with hyper ledger in like airplanes and military and uh you know spacecrafts where one piece that is being tracked on these blockchain networks can be worth 10 million dollars or even more and the providence of that information is super super super important as well um so i'd love to talk if we have some time really about verifiable credentials as we get down to the level of how do you track these pieces as well but duncan i'll let you address um kind of the permission on the permission and permissionless question because i know you have a lot of experience there as well well so the where i would draw the distinction is um uh yeah if you want to buy a board ape you have to do it if you know what a board ap is um uh and you want to be a member of the board eight yacht club then then you're going to be doing that on the ethereum main net and if you're the poor person that sold your accidentally sold your board for three uh three thousand instead of three hundred thousand um uh us or the ethereum equivalent then then i'm very sorry for you but leaving aside those crazy things and by the way the person or the bot that bought that spent the equivalent of 32 000 in order to make sure that transaction went through super fast so they they bought 75 eth to do that so or something like that uh not 75 sorry but um sorry the the the board 8 was listed at 0.75 over each instead of 75 each but the the the personal bot that bought it spent the equivalent of you know 32 000 in order to see that transaction through i imagine consumers do not want to be in that business of it's going to cost me 32 000 to find out whether this product uh it was ethically sourced or not so i'm making a serious point here you know the business may be backed by a blockchain or a dlt but that doesn't mean in this context that everybody that is engaging with carrefour to pick that example has anything to do with the blockchain because they're running an app on their iphone and and all their and it's not a wallet it's an app it's just a plain garden app so yeah so so god forbid that they're actually into interacting with the blockchain that that's beyond that's besides the point what they're doing is and this is to daniella's point earlier it's enterprise middleware at the end of the day not even enterprise software and therefore you're building uh an entire sort of set of applications and services on top of that you're probably using a service-oriented architecture blah blah blah blah and eventually you know that will then present itself or some fraction of that will present itself to a to a customer who wants to scan a qr code and figure out where something came from so i think you know there are there are levels of trust here so you know we have to trust carrefour at some level are going to give me an iphone or android app that is actually you know secure and presents information that that they are comfortable with the way they source that information when it comes to a supply chain it's far more critical outside of their control that they have reliable information because within the bounds of carrefour there is a lot of checks and balances so once you move outside of that and you're trying to establish the provenance of you know a raw material yeah was it sustainably and ethically this is important ethically sourced you know was child labor or modern slavery involved you know these are just as important as the environmental aspects so so i would say uh in this context you know we're not asking every consumer to interact with a blockchain permissioned permissionless private public um and and really it's it's about you know any more than you would say hey i want to just jump on the swift network the swift network is an interbank payments network it's not a network designed for consumers and you know you would not be allowed anywhere near it nor should you be so i think it's understanding that this is a very sort of uh sophisticated multi-layered uh world that we live in as enterprise and and what we're doing is backing that or underwriting that i like to say underwriting that using a dlt so you're underwriting information and and uh using a dlt but you know it's it's not what a consumer is like to be interacting with anytime soon thank you duncan we are uh probably around three minutes left i would just like to address and i'll throw something here for uh pedro and garens to confirm there's a question here didn't you all have private systems uh following the supply chains already i mean before the blockchain uh are there applications informations you couldn't access before uh and i'm gonna give my answer and let me see if you to concur with that and uh what what you would like to complement and the answer is yes we had systems that were tracking that before those systems were very efficient what were we missing um i don't think we're missing much uh now there is possibilities that blockchain brings in terms of value when it transforms this set of isolated systems or systems that are connected with some suppliers now we have a true fabric of every single person participating into that is adding to that data and this is the true value that it brings in the long run uh and that complements a little bit of the other question about how to ensure credibility of information well once you have this fabric you have the information that's verified by multiple source especially in the supply chain you know you have someone that is the let's say the farmer and then there's the transportation in the middle there's a an initial warehouse and there's another transportation there's the initial factory that will receive the raw materials the production line then it goes into a retailer and so on and so forth uh we have very few minutes left uh pedro and guarants uh i'll start with you pedro do you want to compliment that yeah i'll i'll just do it uh shortly i think and and i'm going to link this to uh to the to the private versus public or permissioned or so i agree with all you said i think we are just building the fabric the interaction and leveraging on what we all in the same industry across different industries have in common and and i think it's very important to take into account the the the conversation is not public versus private i think we need to start speaking about the centralization public versus private is so obsolete that it doesn't make sense it's uh it was at the beginning okay what do you prefer ethereum or a fabric it's that's um apologies no offense but i think that's stupid right now we are so beyond that because i think the the level of central decentralization the number of partners uh and members validating and verifying the information it's what counts so at the end of the day a private permission a public permission might be as valid as the other right and i i leave you uh two guarans as i think we're out of time yes so the only thing i i could add is um the importance of real time when we had uh traceability before the blockchain we had to connect with a producer asking for the documentation and get it back through mail to any system so we couldn't have it uh every batch um we couldn't have it at the moment the producer made the action and so on so it was uh the documentation time and cost was for us to ask the documentation and for the producer to give it back so now we have a connected system we have an authorized system which allows only the farmer or only the vet to add some vet information not the farmer and so on and so on and we have it for every batch so we have quality data both in um the information we have the moment we have the information and the quantity of information we get uh through the blockchain and that changed a lot for us and this transparency we share it with the consumer which is the the only thing um with exposition of api and and it's also transparent for the consumer it was said earlier okay thank you guys i think now it's with daniel otherwise we'll be talking here for hours and hours uh yeah i really appreciate it really really like this panel i think we should leave something for the next time right for next year thank you very much to all panelists it was a very interesting discussion we got a lot of questions from the audience which is always a good sign so thank you very much and i see you next time thank you thanks everybody thank you bye bye thank you