True-code.org
The majority of ESG supply chain issues are in the first mile of supply chains and linked to the location of each supply chain actor. Deforestation being one of the most important ESG topics. For companies to understand if they are connected to deforestation risks in commodity supply chains, transparency is key.
Traders and cooperatives often want to protect private details of facilities in their supply chain or, in case of mass-balance, are unable to tell which facilities where involved. Full end-to-end transparency of high-risk supply chains is not possible today because millions of (smallholder) farmers and producers are not digitally identified.
The True-code.org is developed to allow traders and cooperatives to identify their supply chain facilities for free, hide vulnerable business assets and deliver deforestation related answers to their customers.
At the core, True-code.org provides an interrogation method for one end of the supply chain (buying organization) to ask essential deforestation questions to the other end of the supply chain (first mile, farmers, small holders). While at the same time respecting the need for traders and cooperatives to protect the identity of their business partners.
Who are we?
True-code.org is an initiative of the B-corporation ImpactBuying bv that serves buying organizations with assured ESG supply chain data since 2009. The True-code.org initiative started in 2019 to solve the lack of access to data of the first mile of supply chains. An attempt to improve dramatically the transparency of complex, high-risk supply chains by addressing the barriers that proprietary tech-based solutions alone can’t solve.
Challenge
Full end-to-end transparency of high-risk supply chains is not possible today because millions of smallholder farmers are not digitally connected and key intermediaries like commodity traders and cooperatives feel a need to protect the private details of their business partners. With a first focus on getting verified answers on deforestation questions in commodities True-code.org will use the experience to expand the True- code.org concept and technology in 2023 to test if it can be used for fair value distribution linked to living wages and living income.
Services
We are taking action to create end-to-end transparency by offering two key services: free self-service for traders and cooperatives to generate True-code.org facility passports and True-code.org ID’s for (smallholder) farmers and other supply chain actors with a guarantee that private details of facilities are hashed, Free interrogation by buyers on the True-code.org facility passport numbers received from traders or cooperatives that are part of the True-code.org distributed network, and request answers to be verified.
For who?
The True-code.org concept and technology is especially interesting for retailers who have committed to deforestation pledges, need (verified) answers from commodity traders and or cooperatives that are not willing and/or able to share the private details of their business partners: soy, coffee, cacao, palm oil, nuts, oil, FCOJ etc. True-code.org allows traders and/or cooperatives to demonstrate their willingness to deliver transparency and compliance and respects their need to guarantee privacy of the actors in their supply chain.
End goal
An simple and easy to integrate facility identification solution that is owned by everybody and nobody at the same time that allows getting verified answers on risk related questions while at the same time preserving the incentive for any actor in the supply chain to be rewarded for providing additional value-added services and innovation.
Who benefits?
All supply chain actors, upstream and downstream but also verifiers like certification
bodies, standard owners and legislators.
The concept is simple, the technical architecture is simple. The True-code data model has only 3 public fields and all other fields are private. To identify each facility that plays a role in a given supply chain the open source True-code/UUID based on ISO/IEC 9834-8is added as the unique identifier on top of the existing facility identifiers in the data repository.