YOUR FOOD - ITS STORY - OUR PROOF

Source food made with attributes you want, grown responsibly and with claims you can trust.

Agri-Food – Feeding the World

Food and food security are easy to take for granted in Canada, but not everywhere. Access to high-quality, affordable food that is sustainably sourced is becoming more challenging. Here are some facts:

  • Agri-Food is a $US8+ trillion industry globally, and represents around 10% of the entire global economy.
  • Its annual growth will outpace annual population growth over the next 30 years as we push towards 10 billion people by 2050.
  • The Agri-Food industry is subject to tremendous disruption from swings in demand caused by:
    • Shifts in income level
    • Black-swan events like pandemics
    • Shifts in preferences and food choices

The mission of TrustBIX is simple: we want to address evolving consumer demands and become the most trusted and largest source of responsible supply chain information globally – Gate to Plate®. 

By 2023, Deloitte feels the global market for Responsible Supply Chain tools will be $US 2.7 billion.

Challenges

We are, undeniably, living in an increasingly complex world with a rapidly changing "food-scape." While population numbers and overall demand for food and agricultural products are on the rise, our biggest challenge is how to meet it in a sustainable, ethical, and empowering fashion that accounts for the needs of producers, processors, and consumers alike.

  • Fraud: How do we mitigate the erosion in trust caused by $US 10-70 billion a year in fraudulent food claims? 
  • Waste: How do we enhance sustainability to reduce the roughly 1/3 of all edible food that is lost to waste annually?
  • Accountability: Consumers want to know where their agri-food products came from, and how they were produced.

The big question that ties all of them together is this: How can we implement comprehensive solutions in an industry that is only now starting to embrace digital technology and give effective incentives? That's where TrustBIX comes in.

Challenges-Visual-01

Strategic Sourcing

Food-Supply-Chain-01

Validating Chain of Custody Integrity in Sourcing Premium Products – Gate to Plate®

Traceability in food production is defined as tracing food through the production and distribution chain to:

  1. Identify risks.
  2. Protect public health.
  3. Address acceptable limits in the production of food.
  4. Assist in maintaining the quality and safety of products. 

TrustBIX’s BIX technology platform goes beyond collecting data to support traceability for Food Safety.  Rather than answering the question “Is my food safe?”, the BIX solution answers the following question:

CEO Clips Feature:

Watch TrustBIX CEO Hubert Lau talk tracing food from Gate to Plate on this B-TV interview clip.

Can I trust the food claims made and for which I am paying a premium?

Examples of claims might be that the food:

  1. Was produced at a certain location or region;
  2. Was produced in a sustainable manner;
  3. Is a particular strain or breed;
  4. Had or is free from certain additives, hormones, or treatments;
  5. Was raised with a particular nutritional program.

How do we do this? Our proprietary cloud-based platform, BIX, provides chain-of-custody traceability through the entire supply chain, allowing us to act as a neutral, trusted third-party to validate claims made about ingredient attributes and production practices.

Case Studies

In 2015, TrustBIX created the Beef InfoXchange system (BIXS), the backbone technology platform for McDonald’s first Verified Beef Sustainability Pilot program.  This very first system in the world was tested in Canada and has successfully demonstrated full traceability from “birth to burger.”  During the Pilot, 144 producer operations were verified as sustainably managed. 

The BIX system was used to validate that only sustainable operations handled the animal before it was harvested. In total, during the pilot, the BIXS platform verified a total of 8,967 head, and from this, according to McDonald’s, the company sourced over 300,000 pounds of Canadian beef trim. 

Learn More

CRSBThe next stage in the evolution of a sustainable Canadian beef supply chain was to add the payment of an incentive per head for sustainably-sourced animals to producers with verified sustainable operations, and where an animal moved through only verified operations before it was harvested.  This “all-or-none” Incentive Model encouraged participants to understand to whom they were moving an animal, and got verified operations to encourage downstream operations to also get verified as sustainable. 

The Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (CRSB), comprised of industry leaders (including Canadian Cattlemen’s Association, JBS, Cargill, McDonald’s, Costco, Ducks Unlimited and World Wildlife Fund), set the guidelines of what indicators are used to measure sustainability.  The incentive Model was tested over 8 quarters in the Canadian Beef Sustainability Acceleration Pilot (CBSA), which was created in partnership with Cargill.  The Pilot ran between late 2017 and late 2019, and the BIX system was used to validate that a verified sustainable chain of custody was preserved for animals supplied to Cargill.  Where Chain of Custody was validated, TrustBIX also managed the settlement of incentive payments made by Cargill back to all operations in the upstream supply chain that touched the animal, and these payments were typically ~$18/Head for each of the Quarters the pilot operated. 

Reasons for Optimism

In 2020, McDonald’s has expanded its commitment to source Canadian Sustainable beef not only for their Certified Angus burger but also for Quarter Pounders sold in Canada, and Cargill has commercialized the Pilot into an ongoing Sustainable Sourcing Program, where the BIX platform is used to validate sustainable chain of custody. For our accomplishments in the Beef Industry, learn more about “Canada’s Beef Advantage” at the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association Web-site here. 

Get on Board with TrustBIX.

Learn more about why now is a great time to join the sustainable food revolution and invest in TrustBIX.