BeefLedger wins two Good Design Awards

BeefLedger has bagged two awards — ‘Service Design - Commercial Services’ and ‘Design Strategy’ — at the 2020 Good Design Awards.

Streamlining transactions in the beef supply chain

With food fraud costing around AU$40 billion a year globally, BeefLedger developed a blockchain technology-enabled beef provenance tracking and credentialing platform. Employing export smart contracts to streamline cross-border payments, the platform is designed to strengthen consumer confidence and protect Australia as a premium producer of safe, high-quality produce.

BeefLedger was the winner of the 2020 Good Design Awards ‘Service Design - Commercial Services’ category, with the jury commenting: “A strong design combining mature approaches with newly developed blockchain technologies for an elegantly simple result. It’s a great example that demonstrates the intersection of data and design.”

Connecting Australian producers and Chinese consumers

While BeefLedger is an integrated blockchain-enabled food provenance and smart contract transaction platform, BeefLegends is its design-led consumer engagement strategy.

BeefLegends combats food fraud by embedding authentic regional stories in the data that credentials Australian beef exported to China. It is designed to connect two ends of the supply chain for mutual benefit.

BeefLegends was the winner of the ‘Design Strategy’ category at the 2020 Good Design Awards, with the jury commenting: “BeefLegends embodies positive innovation connecting two ends of the supply chain for mutual benefit for the first time. It’s exciting to see a truly transdisciplinary approach bringing together technical expertise in blockchain and smart contract development; legal expertise in international trade, policy and governance; and humanities expertise in food provenance and consumer culture. Purposeful area for design which has been integrated into their strategy representing good thinking of the broader ecosystem.”

BeefLedger Chairman Warwick Powell said that receiving recognition for design excellence speaks volumes for the team’s creativity in solving problems and bringing new approaches together to create new value. “The BeefLedger project is more than a standard ‘track and trace’ with technology activity. It is an ecosystem design underpinned by the idea of data-driven value in motion incentivising behavioural change in supply chains by transparently rewarding the pursuit of excellence,” he said.

Both projects were designed by BeefLedger in collaboration with researchers at Queensland University of Technology. The design and development was undertaken as part of the Export Smart Contracts Project, funded jointly by BeefLedger, Queensland University of Technology and Food Agility CRC.

Dr Brandon Gien, CEO of Good Design Australia, said: “Receiving a Good Design Award is a significant achievement given the very high calibre and record number of entries received in 2020.”

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Alexander Raths