Jalan Sukses: Gric Coin: Cryptocurrency to Fight Food Counterfeit

Fraud in the food and beverage sector is big business, for good and bad reasons.

Globally, the cost of food fraud is estimated at over $50 billion a year, and ranks among other global illicit trades, including illegal timber, drug and people smuggling, in terms of scale and profitability.

Food fraud is the passing off of an inferior product for a more valuable one. Such activities can be hugely profitable for the fraudsters. But for the brands being counterfeited, customers who don't get what they are expecting add up to serious brand damage. Even a single food fraud incident can cost companies from 2 to 15 per cent of annual revenue.

Africa has a fake food problem. Food Counterfeit, soy sauce, rice, and eggs are among the potentially deadly items found for sale. Now, a project called Gric Coin wants to fight back against fake foods by using blockchain, the tech behind Bitcoin. Africa’s food market Businesses, that may be worth more than US$1tn each year by 2030, is going to begin experimenting with blockchain, a digital ledger system that’s a sort of giant global spreadsheet, to track genuine food products through the supply chain.

The innovation, development and adoption of blockchain technology, has enabled Gric Coin to enhance the traceability of their products. Blockchain technology is a digital, decentralised public ledger that stores transactions in the form of “blocks”. Each transaction is recorded and added in a chronological order, forming a chain of blocks or a “blockchain”. Once a block has been added to the chain it cannot be altered, as that would affect the blocks that came afterwards. Because of the complexity of global supply networks, the decentralised characteristic of blockchains removes the need for a centralised body – such as a bank or government – to intervene, creating greater transparency of transactions.

The Gric Coin farm project aims to create a brand that will be a benchmark in the agricultural industry, remove imitation and food counterfeiting, bring about transparency with the aid of blockchain, create a vehicle for people to invest on real life agriculture and earn reward on their investments.

The fund raised will be used to set up of a 1000 acres farm with a processing factory where crops will be processed and packaged. All processed and packaged items will come with its unique barcode that contained item information and company details. These details will be stored on blockchain. At any point in time, consumers and other stake holders can scan this barcode on the Gric Coin blockchain site to carry out product verification and determine if the concerned item is a genie product or a counterfeited one.

The Gric Coin Project is divided into three major parts:

The Farm Project: This involves the purchase of 1000 acres of land for mechanized farm and processing industry for farm produce. The farm project includes our farm, processing industry and the blockchain website that will be used for product authentication and verification.
The Coin Utility Project: This involves the upgrading of our www.FarmPartner.ng project and creating of apps for the site from fund generated from the ICO. In this project, investors will visit our FarmPartner website, pick from a range of farm businesses in various part of the African continent, each of the farm business comes with specific cost and return on investment. Investors can pick a farm of their choice and invest in it with our Gric Coin. At the end of the agreed period, the investors will be paid back their initial investment and agreed return on investment. Gric Coinwill be the only acceptable means of payment on the FarmPartner website. This will drastically increase the usage of our coin and create more demand for scarce resources.
Service Adoption: This involves other businesses adopting our Gric Coin project service and block chain system to create standard in their agricultural business. We strongly believe that our coin and site adoption would be done by other businesses.