Every single day, millions of tons of food are moved from one end of the globe to the other. Raspberries from Chile head for Calgary. Alberta lentils ship to India. More than 52 kilotons of potatoes alone travel from Israel to the United Kingdom.

And a large fraction of all that food traveling all over the world will go to waste: food loss sits around 35% (with more than 80% of that occurring before the food ever gets to retail). Provision, a Calgary-based software and analytics company, believes that data transparency can improve the food-supply chain—from farm to fork—and radically reduce the amount of waste. In fact, they’re working toward the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development goals 2 and 12: zero hunger and greatly reduced food losses along production and supply chains.

Provision’s proprietary software platform finds anomalies, trends, and inconsistencies in food manufacturing to improve food traceability and safety; Machine Learning capabilities and predictive analysis prevent common risks and mistakes. With fewer food shipments going astray, waiting for inappropriate amounts of time in shipping docks, or subject to recall, food waste will decline.

KICKSTART IN COPENHAGEN

Provision got a kickstart in the summer of 2018, when they were one of ten startups—and the only company from the Americas—selected from a field of nearly 400 applicants to participate in shipping giant Maersk’s inaugural FoodTrack accelerator in Copenhagen, Denmark. Maersk transports 38% of the world's food and was looking for entrepreneurs with unique ideas around reducing food loss in the supply chain. Erik Westblom, Provision’s CEO, realized that the opportunity to participate in the Maersk accelerator was a once-in-a-lifetime chance.

“When we got the call that we were accepted, Provision went into high gear,” says Westblom. “We had a shell website, an incorporation number, and a deeply researched concept. . . the rest was built in Copenhagen.” In Copenhagen, he participated in intensive workshops and mentoring sessions that helped hone the company’s competitive strategy, market validation and pitching—skills that built on the training he received during his Executive MBA studies at the University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business. He also benefitted from Maersk’s operational expertise and introduction to its complex, globe-spanning infrastructure.

When he returned to Calgary from Europe, Provision came to life. Westblom began an aggressive search for staff, co-founders, and investors, and secured grants through Alberta Innovates and Canada’s Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP).

“In just nine months, we turned an idea into a commercial software that has saved countless labour hours, recalls, and waste for industry-leading food companies,” says Westblom.

One of the reasons the company was able to pull that product together so quickly is that the foundations were so strong. Westblom spent years researching and refining the basic idea, including on trips to Italy and France where he interviewed farmers on practices and behaviors around food fraud and supply chain mechanics. He was deeply aware of the challenges, the competitors and the cash requirements, and battle-tested his own commitment to the idea with 16-hour workdays. Provision software was built from scratch, in-house, and the company owns all intellectual property rights to a data model and structure completely unique to the industry.

“Provision expedites food safety processes by automating record-keeping and workforce management. Our software analyzes the data to deliver client-specific insights, reducing food waste and quality deviations.”

HOW IT WORKS

Every company that handles food has to institute a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) system, ensuring that each step in product manufacturing, storing and distribution can be analyzed and monitored for biological, physical and chemical hazards. However, the food industry is antiquated. Westblom estimates that for 97% of food companies —from farmers to processors to retailers— still track their products manually, typically on paper. It is both expensive and slow for a food manufacturer to track every production run without technology; Across the food supply chain, paper records create blind spots, and the missing or mistaken information causes excessive food waste and recalls.

Provision’s innovation is to allow data entry via smartphone, tablet, and computer—in the office, on the production line, in a storage facility and elsewhere. Its software greatly increases the speed and accuracy of food safety processes. Provision enables food safety managers to assign forms and be instantly notified of deviant or missing information; forms are auto-populated throughout food production processes, and instantly shared between suppliers and their customers. This streamlines and organizes a complex and interwoven process, connecting the food chain.

Throughout this process, a vast amount of food production information is collected about employees, raw material, facilities, equipment, shipping, packaging, cleaning, etc. All of that data then flows through Provision, producing unique traceability graphs and other reporting on each client’s home dashboard. This tracking insight enables farmers, manufacturers, and transporters to refine their processes, making it more economic and sustainable to produce food.

"Let’s say debris falls into a cereal product,” says Westblom. “That manufacturer will, in most cases, have to unwind the entire recall mechanism via paper trail, or at best a series of spreadsheets. The majority of food companies do it with paper and clipboard to this day, often calling every single customer.” If the company in question deployed Provision, they would one-click a traceability report to pinpoint the affected shipment, rather than recalling and disposing of an entire product line.

PREDICTIVE RECALL USING AI

Provision has access to a 50-year data set on food recalls for the USA, Canada and EU. The company is currently building an artificial intelligence capability around that, including elements of predictive recall and auto-classification of food for export.

Major countries run six-digit Harmonized System (HS) codes to identify products. Provision has built a Machine Learning tool that auto-classifies different types of food into thousands of categories. With this capability, shippers can avoid having perishable food rot on the palette for lack of knowing what exactly it is.

TRACKING COVID-19: BASECASE

The scalability of Provision allowed it to quickly spin out a second product, Basecase, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Basecase lets employees submit secure temperature and symptom metrics, allowing food companies to track their own health and safety risk online and identify areas of trending risk. Alerts and monitoring help employers manage contact tracing so they can limit the spread of illness among their workers. An upgrade can show which employees touched which food product on which day. Buyers or producers can now see whose temperatures changed and which lots were affected; this can reduce recall costs exponentially and is useful beyond the present pandemic crisis.

Provision treats privacy with extreme care and enjoys a higher security rating than Facebook. “Every file is encrypted with 4,096-bit keys; it would take a modern computer over 1,000 years to crack a single key,” says Westblom. While many common platforms (like Facebook) score a B security rating, Basecase data is stored with an A+ rating. “This ensures we're proactively prepared for the data privacy and security standards associated with the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and The EU General Data Protection Regulation.”

THE CHÂTEAUNEUF OF GRAINS

When you go to the store for a bottle of wine, you don’t expect that all the bottles are exactly the same and should cost the same price. Westblom believes the same thinking should apply to wheat and other grains and intends to help de-commoditize Alberta's crops—which are “in the heart of the highest quality grain production in the world.” By demonstrating and measuring safety, sustainability and even superior nutrient content, Provision software can build trust and change companies’ messaging to their consumers, who often don’t have access to transparent production information.

“If we have that farm-level data, we can tell people where their food came from, and we can dive into the impacts of certain choices made by processors along the way,” says Westblom. “For example, let’s say Farmer A uses Fertilizer X and the product was processed in certain way—we can derive insight into how those choices and decisions impact food waste and shelf life. This is our long-term vision. We're working toward the UN goals of 0% hunger and food waste. If we can get enough saturation into our platform, we can run further Machine Learning analysis to identify trends of certain products being wasted.”

PROTEIN INDUSTRIES SUPERCLUSTER

Provision has recently partnered with the 120K-acre Coutts Agro grain/oilseed farm in Kindersley, Saskatchewan, and two other Calgary partners in a $9.25 million project to improve farm efficiency and profitability. Partially funded and sponsored by Protein Industries Canada, Provision will use data collected by Skymatics and Verge Technologies to help reduce farming costs, improve efficiency, provide important information to consumers, and de-commoditize Canadian crops by tracing and validating valuable differentiating factors—such as input practices, safety practices, carbon impact and water use.

WHAT’S NEXT

Provision has grown by over 20 times in 2020 so far. Its software demand has expanded from bakeries and beverage manufacturers into food transporters, all the while building AI insights for grain and horticulture. The company continues to seek strong partners. "Competition in this particular space or value chain isn’t helpful. We believe the agtech and foodtech industry needs to look at a partner-first model,” says Westblom. “I want to work with companies everywhere to find ways to innovate the food ecosystem and find value-added opportunities.”

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Provision: Reducing global waste and hunger