Progress 07/01/21 to 03/31/22

Outputs
Target Audience:There are several parties in the commercial sector and society as a whole that will benefit from our innovation. Shipping and Receiving plants: Shipping and receiving plants will benefit from access to wash and transport of prior commodity history data stored in a mobile application. Food Grade Tank Washes: Access todata will eliminate guesswork regarding products transported, thus ensuring accuracy of information collected and output documentation generated at wash locations. Trucking Companies - Less downtime and wait time is wasted while waiting for verification of paperwork Federal Government: Government regulators will benefit from atracking and tracing system that will certify movement of liquid freight while providing visibility into transportation logistics at the different facilities associated with a load. Society as a whole will benefit through Additional transparency in the supply chain. Compliance with certain religious standards such as Kosher certification Changes/Problems:2021 & 2022 have been challenging years for our team and staffing and COVID-19 restrictions caused us to need to make changes to our original planned approach to our development and testing process and ultimately lead to us taking a 30-day extension to our performance period to be able to fully execute on the technical objectives and complete an adequate level of testing to be confident in our results. In addition to staffing and COVID-19 restrictions, some changes to our business environment since the original application led us to have to re-examine our original testing plan. We originally had identified and secured the commitment for participation in the testing portion of our project from a key food manufacturer that we worked very closely with however our business relationship with that company as it was at the time of the application effectively ended and we no longer had our own fleet equipment performing activities at the company's location. Because of these changes, we had to pivot to allow for our own personnel to perform the functions of a Tank Wash operator and a Plant Intake Operator to be able to perform the activities 100% through their daily workflow and accomplish the goal of capturing the entire trailer history in a certified, immutable format. While we had to make changes to our testing plans, our development objectives did not change and the proof of concept applicaion/process that was developed is what was originally intended. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided? Nothing Reported How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Since this is a Phase 1, Proof of Concept project, the largest community of interest the USDA/NIFA towards learning about what we have developed and whether what we have done thus far has positioned us to be eligible to receive Phase 2 grant funding to continue forward with our work. In addition to the USDA/NIFA, we have had conversations with our Rabbinical councilabout the work we developed because they were an initial supporter of our Phase 1 effort. They showed continued interest in our proposed continued effort to the point that they provided a letter of support for our Phase 2 project and see a future path for the usage of our product within their organization to prove the lineage of the trailers that they certify as Kosher. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? Nothing Reported

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? In fall 2020 our team began work on our USDA/NIFA Phase I Proof-of-Concept project that set out to address the lack of transparency and traceability with regards to each tanker that transports liquid food grade products between plants and/or from farms to plants. The currently method of tracking and tracing is done manually, which is subject to human error or, in the worst cases, alteration or falsification. Improperly cleaned trailers and inaccurate or inaccessible documentation can lead to severe illness or death if allergens or contaminants are not properly cleaned and documented and end up in processing plants or in consumer foodstuffs. In addition to this the current methods of tracking and documentation can lead to tankers being rejected prior to loading or, even worse, at the delivery due to inaccurate information being present on paperwork. To solve this need, we set out to develop a prototype Blockchain, distributed ledger-based application that will track, trace, and provide the transparency and immutable data source necessary to create a transparency and traceability across our industry, benefiting Shippers & Receivers of liquid food grade products, Haulers of liquid food grade products, regulators of liquid food grade products, and ultimately the end consumers of those liquid food grade products who can now be assured that the products that they are consuming have been transported in vessels that are certified and fit to transport those goods. Our first objective - Objective 1:Select a block chain/distributed ledger system and model the workflow of transactions in the distributed ledger system - resulted ultimately in the selection of a Sawtooth/Hyperledger private, permissioned blockchain environment as well as the selection of our primary trailer identification method for use within our application/environment. Once we had identified these pieces, we modeled the workflow of the entire lifespan of a trailer's wash, load & unload activities and ultimately identified which data components would need to be captured at each point in the process and ultimately which pieces of information would need to be stored in the Sawtooth environment vs outside of the blockchain. For our second objective - Objective 2:Prototype a mobile app or functional wireframe that implements the workflow from Objective 1 - we went beyond the wireframe and were able to complete a fully functional private application in the Expo Go environment that allowed us to take the data modeled in Objective 1 and build out a process flow that follows the wash, load & unload activities discussed in Objective 1 and implements the scanning of a QR code that is linked to the VIN of the trailer for quick identification of the trailer and visibility to its history. For our third and final objective - Objective 3:Test the proof-of-concept workflow in a commercial setting to validate contributions to food safety and certification (10-20 trailers for 8 weeks across 2 or more facilities) - we implemented the application developed in Objective 2 in our own tank wash and trucking company as well as collecting information from an outside trucking company. We tracked a total of 65 trailers. Our own 33 trailers were tracked over 479 tank wash events, 101 loading events, 95 unloading events and 5 load rejections and we captured 207 additional events from 32 trailers owned by outside trucking companies who agreed to provide their information for tracking. We had 65 "full circle" tracking events that tracked from wash, to load, to unload and back to wash and tracked the hauling of 40 different commodities over the course of our testing period with all data being captured through our application and viewable in our proprietary visibility portal. The successful completion of Objectives 1-3 above has positioned Hagen Logistics, LLC to apply for a USDA/NIFA Phase II Commercialization grant to continue to develop the proof-of-concept developed in our Phase I project to bring the application and the environment that it exists in up to the standards necessary to be made available commercially to the industries that need it. Our efforts in this Phase I project have also resulted in a Provisional Patent application. Our successful prototype introduces an application that fills a gap in the food safety supply chain and provides a holistic view of the history of not just where a trailer has been, but what it has done.

Publications