Tracking food origins

A GEELONG company behind a pioneering paddock-to-plate food production tracking system is starting to raise $4.5 million to develop its use in the US and the UK.

Aglive has invested $7 million in developing the software which collates a myriad of compliance paperwork for food growers, processors and exporters into a single source of digitised information.

The capital raise is the start of a commercial phase for the company which has built its traceability and proof of provenance software for the meat and livestock industry, but is now developing emerging opportunities overseas and in Australian horticulture and seafood.

By combining a farm-based livestock management tool with government and industry regulatory data sets, Aglive tracks the entire production chain to provide a transparent proof of product integrity.

It aims to eventually allow a consumer to reverse trace a product from its barcode back to the source of origin and its journey through the food production chain.

Food fraud is a major international issue, particularly in China, and the sales of fraudulent ‘Australian’ branded beef is estimated at $2 billion a year. Food integrity is a major international issue which last week was highlighted by the discovery of mad cow disease in Scotland, reigniting fears for the British livestock industry which was devastated by the disease through the ’90s.

Founder and executive director Paul Ryan said Aglive had been developed with the support of Meat and Livestock Australia.

“We started in Aussie red meat and we are now the only Meat and Livestock Australia licensed provider of mobile integrity declarations and we are able to connect this and other farmer provenance data through to finished product labels for retailer and consumer protection,” Mr Ryan said.

He said Aglive simplified on-farm compliance through its livestock management application which tracks livestock treatments, feeds, weights, paddock movements and collates the information for industry declarations.

The software, for which international patents are pending, will allow producers and industry marketing groups, such as organic growers which had additional standards to document, to support their products and brands in the market.

“We can add value to farmers’ products by adding accredited, validated data,” Mr Ryan said.

“Because we have all this digital provenance data hooked up to the cloud … all the product from that animal can be linked to that data to get whatever history or genetics or story the farmer wants to connect with to the consumer.”

The commercial raise, which is only open to sophisticated investors, is being handled by Moore Stephens in Geelong.