An interview with Erik Arokszallasi, Trung Dao Ha, Marton Ven, the founders of TE-FOOD International, one of Forward Fooding’s top 500 Food Tech startup.

We asked our FoodTech500 top-runners to give us a bit of insight into how they started out as a company and their thoughts on the role of technology in Food innovation. Meet Erik, Trung and Marton, the founding team behind TE-FOOD International, a farm-to-table food traceability solution using blockchain technology. Let’s see what they had to say.

So tell us a little bit more about you! Where did the idea for your FoodTech company come from?

Erik, Trung and Marton: In an era when we employ robots to take over our tasks, we modify genomes, when we disrupt finance, it’s disappointing to see that we still don’t know what we are eating. 

Globalized food supply chains are operating without sharing data about the products they are working with. This is a massive food safety risk, and decreases operational efficiency of the companies.

Modern technologies such as mobile, IoT, and Blockchain enable efficient data sharing with certain access by the supply chain, consumers, and food safety authorities.

How is tech central to your business?

Erik, Trung and Marton: TE-FOOD works with complete supply chains, and provides all tools and applications which are necessary for successful end-to-end food traceability implementations. 

From object identification to product serialization, to data capture, to data processing and storage, to data presentation to the stakeholder, our solution enables companies with heterogeneous technology backgrounds to collect and share data. This leads to improved biosecurity, and better operational visibility to serve supply chain companies, consumers and authorities as well.

Why do you think it’s important to see the food industry embrace tech?

Erik, Trung and Marton: Food companies make several statements about their products: It’s safe to eat, organic, non-GMO, halal, from sustainable farming, no child labor was used, etc. Sometimes, these statements are true, sometimes they aren’t. The most important thing is that consumers have to trust the food company to tell the truth about their policies. So, the food industry relies on trust, and now this trust is fading. Better quality inspection methods and technologies reveal more contamination and food fraud cases than earlier. Emotional headlines in the news, and the ability to share the news quickly through social media resulted that more and more people know about food scandals. For the average consumer, it seems like the state of food safety would be worse nowadays, and the common dissatisfaction is growing. 

Modern technologies like mobile, IoT, AI and Blockchain enable food supply chains to collect, process, store, and share information on their activities, changing their processes to reach radical transparency. 

 

 

Want to know more? See TE-FOOD International’s full profile here.

Congratulations again to TE-FOOD International for ranking ninth in the category “Food Safety & Traceability” of the Foodtech 500 list.

To find out who else made it into the FoodTech 500; the top Food Tech companies in the world, click here.

For more FoodTech news, join our Food Revolution community here.