Salad On The Blockchain

In case you haven’t had your daily side of Blockchain, rest assured, it’s coming for your tomatoes too.

One application of blockchain technology is ensuring supply chains are airtight, and a new startup called ripe.io applies this to agriculture. With the slogan “transparency in every bite,” the founders Raja Ramachandran and Phil Harris aspire to track how food is grown and processed to control quality on the way to the consumer—secured by blockchain.

In a beta test, the company applied tech to tomatoes, tracking environmental variables like humidity and temperature as a patch of them grew on a farm in Sharon, Massachusetts. The tomatoes’ quality (i.e. ripeness, sugar content) was also tracked. 

The most obvious potential application of such a project is that consumers could verify that a food really comes from where it says it comes from, or is as organic as it says it is, assuming it’s been verified using a blockchain app, for instance.

But is it worth all the fuss? As Charles Cascarilla, blockchain expert, says: “It’s a tool, and you have to apply it to the right set of problems.” The question is whether tomatoes are a problem that needs solving.