Chasing Organic Froth: Blockchain Can Reveal What’s Truly Natural
With blockchain, every step from farm to kitchen can be tracked, revealing what’s truly organic.
The Gist
The growing popularity of organic food in India masks a troubling reality about its authenticity.
- Many products labeled as organic may not actually be so, with market sales outpacing actual production.
- Regulatory inconsistencies across countries lead to varying standards for organic certification.
- Blockchain technology could provide transparency in the supply chain, ensuring consumers know the true origin of their food.
The craze for organic food products has caught on pretty well in India. Whether you shop online or from a supermarket, you will see organic labels stuck to most edible things. Organic honey, organic turmeric, organic jaggery. The catalogue is huge.
The word not only sounds like a one-man army against everything unhealthy, but also promises a cleaner and more livable planet. A perfect offering indeed.
The marketing idea, of course, is to stand apart from regular variants of the same food category and command premium pricing.
But here’s the thing, very few people know about: a lot of what’s labelled organic probably isn’t.
In a recent interaction with The Core, Algorand’s Nikhil Varma, who has helped several companies set up their supply chains on the blockchain, said that the amount of organic food sold in the market is two to three times what’s actually grown.
Let that sink in.
After hearing this, your thoughts are likely to run towards the conclusion that some fraudsters are taking you for a ride in the name of organic food. You might be right about that, but that's only part of the problem.
We simply don’t have a way to prove where our food really comes from or what’s been done to it. In other words, the whole supply chain is full of blind spots.
In August this year, the Indian government initiated action against five agencies for certifying ordinary cotton as organic cotton.
In November 2024, the Indian Customs Department slapped a penalty on two exporters for trying to ship non-basmati white rice as organic non-basmati white rice.
The Label Game
There is another aspect of the problem. “Organic” doesn’t mean the same thing everywhere.
In some countries, your food only needs to be 2% organic to qualify for the label. In others, it’s 95%. So the same product could be certified organic in one place and rejected in another.
In Australia, for example, there is no regulation governing the use of the term organic on food products sold in the country. This allows products to be labelled as organic even if they contain as little as 2% organic ingredients.
In the US, on the other hand, products must contain at least 95% organic ingredients to bear the USDA Organic seal, while those with 70-94% organic content can only be labeled as “Made with Organic Ingredients”. The EU and Canada both require a minimum of 95% organic content to carry the organic logo.
And then come the middlemen, exporters, and certifying agencies — all with their own separate agenda, standards, and loopholes. Their methods are designed to ensure you never know the truth about your favourite organic stuff.
The role of farmers in the whole supply chain is limited. Although they know how organic their products really are, they don't have any say in the way their produce is labelled. Someone further up the chain may decide to call an ordinary product “premium organic”, and there is no way to stop it or verify it.
In 2023, a European Union audit found lapses in the certification of Indian organic products for exports, including farmers who are part of organic producer groups knowing nothing about organic farming.
Meanwhile, you and I are paying more for food that might be regular stuff in disguise.
How To Fix This
There are tons of data associated with everything organic — how the soil is treated, what chemicals are used (or not used), how the food is stored, moved, and packed.
All this information is required to establish whether what has come from the farm to your kitchen is organic or not.
Unfortunately, none of that data flows cleanly. Some of it gets lost, and most of it remains hidden or gets manipulated as it moves downstream. And that’s where the problem lies.
But this can change with blockchain, a secure technology that does not allow anybody to manipulate data.
This technology can ensure that we are not forced to rely solely on some non-descript quality certificate obtained by a producer several months ago. Instead, we are provided with some real-time, verifiable data such as sensors in the soil, and GPS tags that track produce from the field to your grocery cart.
That way you wouldn’t need to believe some label anymore. Instead, you can track every step of the product journey.
So, What Now?
A few global players like IBM Food Trust have already built this kind of system. It allows food retailers, suppliers and growers to see supply chain data in near real time, enabling a more transparent and efficient method of determining the origin and safety of produce.
But the biggest hurdle is getting people in the supply chain to share their data and be okay with the fact that once the data is in the system, it can’t be modified.
Until we get there, “organic” will continue to be mostly a sticker that makes us feel good and safe. Very much like a feel-good story we would like to believe.
So next time you reach for that box with the green label, maybe stop and ask yourself:
Organic by whose standards?
Because chances are, no one really knows.
This series is brought to you in partnership with Algorand.
