Australian Government Serves up $4mil in Grants, Supports Blockchain Food Tracing Startup

The Australian Government will distribute $4 million in funding to a variety of Australian tech startups and enterprises through the traceability grants program, providing blockchain-based farm-to-table supply chain systems with funding. 

The Department of Agriculture’s Traceability Grants Program, operating from  2019 to 2020 and 2022 to 2023, is aimed squarely at the Australian supply chain ecosystem and will see $7 million distributed across two rounds.

North Sydney-based blockchain startup FreshChain Systems is one of the first Aussie enterprises to receive an injection of capital from the grants program, and will use $195,000 in funding to launch a program that digitises end-to-end traceability in the agriculture sector.

The tech stack presented by FreshChain sits comfortably within the scope for the Australian Government’s Blockchain Roadmap. The FreshChain platform uses distributed ledger technology to create immutable provenance data for Australian food, providing traceability across the entire life cycle of food products.

Australian Blockchain Use Cases Expand Beyond Payments

In a press release published on July 27,  Agriculture, Drought and Emergency Management Minister David Littleproud noted the broad use cases of blockchain technology:

“FreshChain’s end-to-end traceability system has broad applications across all food, fibre and agricultural products for authentication, provenance, food safety and consumer engagement,”

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdown has heightened consumer awareness of food provenance, creating fertile ground for the Sydney-based blockchain food tracing platform to grow. FreshChain is one of 16 Australian enterprises that will share in $4 million in funding under the first round of the Department of Agriculture’s Traceability Grants Program.