Latitude 28°

Initiative

Latitude 28° Produce leans on powerful technology tools like e-commerce, advanced data analysis, augmented reality, and blockchain to allow Australian agro-producers to sell their products to Chinese consumers. They market their products as interactable, engageable and traceable, so that consumers in the PRC have a more positive and trustworthy produce and grocery shopping experience.

L28 approached WPIC in 2018 for assistance with several projects in the Chinese market. This case study will focus on the blockchain traceability project that they tasked WPIC with.

Business Problem

At the time of the project, the supply chain between meat products from Australia (highly desirable and sought after in the Chinese market) did not provide certainty for Chinese consumers.

When high quality beef would be processed and shipped from Australia, those packages would end up at the same facilities as beef from, for instance, Uruguay, Brazil, the PRC and other countries, many of whom had much less stringent supply chain and agriculture policies.

This meant that high quality beef would end up on store shelves next to low grade produce, with the customer not knowing the difference when purchasing, despite the Australian sticker on the packaging. It was estimated that close to 50% of the beef in China that was marked as Australian was, in fact, not.

Not only did this threaten the value of the Australian beef arriving in China, but it also had the potential to harm customers who thought they were purchasing a high quality product but were eating lower quality produce. Chinese consumers were aware of these supply chain issues and would regularly question the authenticity of the items they were consuming that were branded as Australian.

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