Introduction

The Swiss elections 2019 have shown that the trend towards sustainable food production will increase. In Switzerland, many regional labels aim at promoting regional production and aiding local producers through an optimal and innovative use of their resources. For example, Pro Zürcher Berggebiete (PZP) awards regional products with the label natu?rli® to foster regional production. These regional networks encompass producers of meat, cheese, fish and wood. The goal of the labels is to strengthen the regional value chains. PZB plans together with the ZHAW a research project to increase the efficiency of the certification process and create opportunities for new business models.

Problem Formulation

Currently, the certification of products is a tedious and costly process: PZB needs to register new products and collect paper-based documentation from the producers. To obtain the natu?rli®-label, producers are checked by external certification institutions. This involves visiting the producers, manually examining documents and recording this data. Once registered, the control of the PZB guidelines needs to be repeated every four years. The whole process is expensive and offers only limited transparency on the product’s origin. A high fraction of the work is done manually and redundantly. In Switzerland, there are countless regional labels similar to PZB suffering from similar inefficiencies.

Solution

Approach The project aims at tackling the beforementioned problems by the development of a shared blockchain-based platform connecting all the stakeholders. This platform should lead to a digitalization and automation of the certification process.

Expected Benefit

• Digitisation of paper-based documents
• End-to-end information flow
• Automation of certification Process
• Remote certification
• Transparency for end-consumer
• Reduction of redundancies for labels