TraceLeaf: letting a European tea buyer scan a pack and see the garden it came from

TraceLeaf's managing director sold high-quality teas to European importers. New buyer requirements asked for evidence of origin, processing dates and certifications for each shipment, and some retailers wanted consumers to see the story behind their tea. Spreadsheets and emailed certificates no longer satisfied them.

We followed tea from plucking in the garden through withering, rolling, fermenting, drying, sorting, blending and packing. Records existed at each stage — plucking registers, factory logs, lab reports — but on paper and in separate systems, and blending made tracing harder.

At each stage, staff record an event — plucked, processed, blended, packed — on a tablet, signed by the recording device and user. Blends link to all their input lots. Periodically, a fingerprint of all events is anchored on a public blockchain, so anyone can verify records were not altered later, without any business data being made public.

Buyers see full lot histories and certificates in a portal; consumers scan a QR code to see a simplified, verifiable story.

A small team with a cryptography engineer for signing and anchoring.

Agreed with the exporter and two importers.

Everything that shipped for gardens, the factory, the exporter, buyers and consumers.

The first shipment recorded end to end on TraceLeaf went to a European importer with a buyer portal link. The importer's retailer added QR codes to packs, and the story of the garden reached consumers directly.

Blockchain is useful for one thing here: proving records were not changed. Everything else belongs in a normal database.

Traceability is a selling point. Buyers valued the evidence as much as compliance.