Neogen Corporation with $3.75B for Food Safety with Blockchain

• Toshendra Kumar Sharma
• February 11, 2020

To adopt innovative blockchain technology, Neogen Corporation, with $3.75B, has entered into a partnership with Ripe Technology (ripe.io) to track the supply chain for food safety. Blockchain can enhance the food and livestock industries as technology is capable of maintaining a history of everything.

According to John Adent, Neogen’s chief executive officer, “Blockchain has tremendous potential throughout the food and livestock industries, both to verify the authenticity of premium products, such as cage-free eggs, and enhance the traceability of issues that require correction, such as those that lead to product recalls”.

The new partnership of Neogen, with Ripe, is collaboratively going to adopt blockchain technology for Neogen’s food safety diagnostics and animal genomics. Neogen, an international food safety, provides test kits along with relevant products for detecting unsafe substances in food.

John Adent further added, “Blockchain technology has a lot to offer both our food safety diagnostic and animal genomic customers, as the technology permanently connects a tremendous amount of potentially critical data, including results from Neogen’s tests, to a food product or animal. There are countless potential benefits to adopting the technology. For example, the genomic profile of a dairy cow could be connected with the feed the animal eats, its medical history, barn environment, quantity and quality of the milk it produces, etc. Blockchain can serve to optimize the entire supply chains of many of the markets that Neogen serves”. Talking about Ripe Technology, launched in 2017, it aims at building long-lasting food confidence with a platform that enables everyone to access information, including the journey and quality of their food.

Raja Ramachandran, CEO of Ripe Technology, believes his company can bring transparency and authenticity in the food supply chain, thus transforming the food industry to the whole next level. He reported that “We are extremely excited that Neogen selected us as their blockchain and ledger technology partner.” According to Crunchbase, Ripe has raised $2.4 million to date. Under the partnership of Ripe with the Neogen Analytics platform, it will help consumers to make data-driven decisions, allowing customers to automate food safety workflows along with continuous monitoring and analyzing.

“Neogen’s diagnostics and DNA expertise can add the highest degree of transparency, and factual correctness for critical issues around authenticity and accuracy on food recalls. We believe this will change the game in food transparency for improved quality assessment from the beginning of the supply chain all the way to consumers,” said Raja Ramachandran, founder, and CEO of Ripe.io. Though, according to Information Services Group (ISG), a Connecticut-based tech research and advisory firm, the significant challenges in blockchain adoption are “non-technical” with a lack of established industry and governance. 

But knowing the potential of blockchain technology, companies are globally bringing blockchain to enhance food safety. IBM has announced a collaboration with Seafood via the IBM Blockchain Platform to digitize the supply chain. Also, Nestle has declared its plans in bringing blockchain technology for its supply chain management as a long term journey with more challenges than others. “ripe.io is the perfect partner for us as we work to adapt the technology to our industry,” Adent continued. “They have real-life experience with working with food producers, food distributors, restaurants, and food retailers — all key market segments for us.”

Both the companies, Neogen and Ripe, will collectively use blockchain as a permanent, immutable means to maintain records for the entire production process.

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