IBM Food Trust™ wins a Platinum Spark International Design Award
How did the IBM Blockchain design team create an award-worthy user experience for blockchain solutions?
We’re excited to announce that our design team at IBM Blockchain Solutions has been recognized with a design award. The IBM Food Trust design is the platinum winner of the 2019 Fall Spark International Design award in the Digital Design category. This award follows close on the heels of a 2019 Red Dot Design award for IBM Blockchain Platform.
The Spark International Design Award is a design competition that promotes “better living through better design.” The awards are given to innovative designs that contribute to better living and the environment — designs that change the world for the better. We’re honored to be recognized by this award organization, as it’s always incredible to see design take the spotlight in the enterprise software field.
What is IBM Food Trust?
IBM Food Trust is a blockchain-based system containing digitized information of the food supply chain. It’s a networked ecosystem in which participants contribute data (such as product events, transactions, and locations) that they want to share with select business partners. IBM Food Trust authenticates the information, stitches it together to provide end-to-end visibility of the supply chain, and makes the key data points easily accessible and transparent to authorized participants. With additional information added, such as food safety certificates, transactions documents, and temperature measurements, IBM Food Trust has become a single source of connected facts. Such a service provides key information to support food crisis contamination investigations, proactive quality monitoring, and insights that can make operations more efficient and help reduce food waste.
IBM Food Trust has begun the journey to provide food supply chain transparency from farms to stores, and from farmers to consumers. This unique IBM Blockchain solution provides the following modules for member organizations:
- Trace — Trace a specific food lot or package of a food product in seconds. Using a transparent and secure network, IBM Food Trust users can gain supply chain visibility upstream or downstream, view the history of location touch points, and verify product source and safety.
- Certificates — Document food safety, sustainability, and other qualifications by securely managing certificates across the entire supply chain. IBM Food Trust users can choose to share or view facility certificates and related food industry documents — improving trust, reducing fraud, and increasing safety and reliability.
- Fresh Insights — Gain fresh insights into the inventory for a specific product along its supply chain. Analyze where and how a specific product lot is spending time with inventory flow, average dwell time, time-since-harvest, and temperature exceptions.
- Consumer App (to be released in 2020) — Provide in-store shoppers with this customizable consumer application for scanning product QR and bar codes. Empower consumers to investigate and verify the source and journey of any food item in hand, including ingredients.
Designing for Food Trust
The IBM Food Trust design challenge was to enable users to consume consistent trace results from widely varying products and processes. The global food supply chain is a large, complex network of participants, ranging from farmers, growers, packers, manufacturers, and distributors, to exporters, importers, logistics partners, retailers, and restaurants. Collecting transactional information — what happens to each food item, where and when, and who sends what-to-whom, is a complex task. And the supply chain process of harvesting, processing, and manufacturing varies greatly across product types. Tracing the origin and location of a product lot and evaluating the freshness of its ingredients requires efficient processing of a vast amount of information.
Presenting supply chain data for varying perspectives requires consolidating a wide array of data, including documents and certificates, ambient temperature, shelf life and inventory, into a consistent visual representation and interaction patterns. Filtering and presenting this data into customized views empowers heterogeneous food supply chain participants to remedy gaps in safety, quality, and consumer trust. Enterprise Design Thinking and user research with our clients supports each stage of design and development.
To cope with the unforeseeable variations of trace results, the IBM Food Trust design strategy was entirely data-driven. The design calls for rendering supply chain views directly from the data, with no predefined process models, to display any product in any supply chain variation. All product views, including farm-to-store, multi-ingredient, and freshness, apply this strategy of dynamically rendering data into a consumable display for end users. For example, the “farm-to-store” view uses an approximation of the supply chain to abstract trace results into sets of similar locations that products have traveled through. This strategy is also applied to present inventory data across supply chain locations, including volume and freshness.
Designing for All
The IBM Food Trust design aims to improve how organizations manage food safety and quality and increase overall consumer trust. Every detail matters. IBM Food Trust users can easily view the touch points, across participating organizations, for a single lot of food and its ingredients. For tainted foods, trace enables evaluating the scope of impact, conducting precision recalls, and identifying related problems. The source of contamination can be identified quickly and accurately, relieving innocent providers of potential harm to sales and reputation. Tracking and tracing contaminated foods in seconds helps prevent and limit food-borne illness, because recall teams can quickly and accurately identify the source and locations of tainted products and engage in intervention.
We would like to thank all of our clients for generously providing us with their guidance, knowledge, feedback, and suggestions. We value every piece of positive and negative feedback as we learn and grow together. We also want to thank our technical team and the IBM Food Trust executives who give us the opportunity to explore unbridled design innovations.
We understand that IBM Food Trust design is on a journey — as we see more data, with information enriched in a way that has never been done before, we are going to experiment, learn, make mistakes, and innovate for the better. With the common goal of providing solutions to food supply chain-related investigations and analyses, our work can only make the world a better place for everyone.
Winning Team
- Chief Designer: Noi Sukaviriya
- Design Team: Chip Toll, Josh Horton, Dom Blanchard, Tucker Adelman, Andrew Nelson, Puja Bakshi
Special shout to the product engineering, digital marketing and offering management teams for being great partners, and contributing to the experience.
Arin Bhowmick (@arinbhowmick) is Vice President, Design at IBM based in San Francisco, California. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
