Our Technology
Connecting fishers and farmers with restaurants to fight food fraud.
As an example, Southern Rock Lobster fisheries contribute over $200 million in landed seafood value to the Australian economy each year. Of this China takes more than 93% of Australia’s total lobster harvest, and more than 95% of the respective product value.
Existing supply chains are disconnected by siloed middlemen who cause delays in payments. Supply chain inefficiencies cause Southern Rock Lobsters to be handled upwards of 10 times. Each time a lobster is handled it releases stress hormones that affect its quality.
The Two Hands team have found similar issues in each imported product category we have entered. The good news is that the Two Hands supply chain is about changing this dynamic. The reengineered supply chain establishes a direct connection between fishers and restaurants and their patrons, where speed, trust and transparency are key.
Every step of the journey is secured by blockchain.
Existing supply chains are opaque, middlemen pocket up to 60% of earnings.
Two Hands has re-engineered the supply chain from the ground up to put people at the centre. Transparency is key. What you do on Two Hands today, will affect who wants to do business with you tomorrow. Trust is confident vulnerability. Two Hands fosters trust by enabling everyone to see, who does what they say they will.
When buying from a local fish market it is impossible to know:
How many wholesale facilities did it pass through?
What temperature was the lobster stored at each facility?
What was the quality of the water in each facility?
How many times has the animal been handled?
Where was it caught?
Was the animal miss treated?
How long ago was the animal caught?
“Food fraud represents a USD 40 billion problem worldwide and is allegedly worth
more than the heroin trade and firearms trafficking combined”
- Dr Sylvain Charlebois, Professor in Food Distribution and Policy, Dalhousie University, Canada
Instead of “trust, but verify”, blockchain enables us to “verify, then trust”. A centralised system is susceptible to abuse. If a business can pay to remove content that is bad for business, how can the system be trusted? How can they be transparent when their supply chain operate in data silos? In a decentralised system there is no one to pay. Everyone can see if your deliveries are late, or you don’t pay your bills on time or you sell low quality product.
In the Two Hands model, a last mile distributor operating a node in China has access to every transaction. The distributor can assure their customers of the data integrity with confidence. The distributor has a record of every transaction in their supply chain.
Immutable changes to a tag's data are visible to everyone in the network. The transactions are immutable and require consensus to be added into the ledger. The shared data view makes the supply chain more transparent. Transparency acts as a trust anchor for collaboration between people across continents.
“It means that we will be able to get our product into China in the most pristine condition ever and the Chinese people will be able to experience perfect Southern Rock Lobster, just as they are when we take them out of the water.”
Fishers Colin and Kae Milstead
(Robe, South Australia)
Two Hands uses the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain framework to run a private distributed ledger. The smart contracts (chaincode) contain the Two Hands business logic for how the data attached to each tag can be updated. The authorisation logic for updating the tag’s data is based on who has custody and what events have occurred.
Two Hands is a blockchain enabled business. Two Hands sits at the application and smart contract layer of the blockchain stack. Hyperledger Fabric is an enterprise blockchain solution offered by IBM, Amazon and Microsoft to clients. Hyperledger Fabric is designed to facilitate transactions between groups of semi trusted parties. In a public network every transaction is visible to everyone. Two Hands creates a private ledger per supply chain.
The Two Hands ecosystem enables a reputation system to provide answers to questions like:
Are your shipments on time?
What is your mortality rate?
How big a customer have you supplied before?
Private ledgers are fast to run, environmentally friendly and enable transparency while protecting the privacy of those involved.
"Traditional supply chains are full of middlemen. Food fraud is a problem because there is no transparency into who did what. Unlike other blockchain projects that bolt into existing processes, Two Hands has re-engineered the supply chain from the ground up to put people at the centre. What you do on Two Hands today, will affect who wants to do business with you tomorrow."
Two Hands is not a marketplace for lobster traders. The details of how, what and where matter. Our ecosystem is built on trust and collaboration to make a better industry for everyone.
Only verified fishers and restaurants are able to join the marketplace. Two Hands has a strict screening process to ensure quality is high on both sides. All inventory and purchase orders are backed with blockchain. Interacting on the marketplace builds the reputations in an immutable and transparent environment.
“Because I know where the lobster comes from, I know it is being cared for. I am cutting out the middleman and it is coming direct to me. It is out of the ocean and two days later it’s here, it’s alive. I know his natural environment and that it is chemical free, it has not been touched by anybody else. What I am getting is a true authentic product”
Chef Alistair Carter
Waldorf Astoria on the Bund Executive
“Two Hands is about leveraging the power of technology to build intelligence into supply chains it is the realization that technology alone is not enough. Acknowledging that people are the fabric of the supply chain is the imperative. This means the producers/farmers/fishermen and the ultimate end consumers. Building a technology experience that enriches all participants is at the core of what Two Hands is about. We often refer to what we are doing as 'Building the Marketplace of the Future' - putting people at the centre.” - Two Hands Director, Wayne Hayes
Our consumer research has shown that freshness, scarcity and premium quality are key to the luxury dining experience.
WeChat is the social platform of choice in China, it is designed to bypass the need for the Google and Apple app stores. No app download is required. Diners simply scan the QR code on their lobster and are taken to a tailored consumer experience.
This acts as a branding channel for the restaurant to deepen the relationship with the diner. The diner can see the provenance of their meal and feel a sense of confidence in the safety and quality of their meal that a fish market can’t provide. This provides recognition to the fisher who made this meal possible and knowledge of the region and product.
