Apio, a young company from the Marche region involved in tracking via blockchain, is working for technologize the entire cocoa supply chain, starting from Africa, for the good of the environment and producers, as told by its administrator and co-founder Alessandro Chelli at the Eurochocolate 2023 fair in Perugia, Italy.

Since 2020, Apio has been using its Trusty blockchain platform to trace the origin of chocolate grown in Ivory Coast and transformed in our country by the Turin-based company Domori thanks to a project expiring in November also financed by the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation (Aics). “The intuition” explains Chelli “was to use the blockchain to protect a long supply chain like that of cocoa, through traceability. It was a difficult challenge because there are so many actors and steps involved.”

In fact, Trusty tracks harvesting, fermentation, drying, delivery, transport, export, entry into the warehouse and all the final transformation processes. The certified information ends up in a QR code placed on each bar and through which the history of each cocoa bean can be traced. “This technology is no longer a futuristic thing. To use it you only need a smartphone” continued Chelli. Furthermore, Trusty is an open source system: the data, the servers and their control are owned by the cooperative.

In 2020 Var Group has signed a partnership with tApio. The agreement, which involves the acquisition of 10% thanks to the subscription of a capital increase, was aimed at integrating the startup's skills in the Blockchain and IoT fields into the Var Group offer. The partnership had already led to the diffusion of Trusty, the innovative Blockchain project for the Food & Beverage sector, a solution for the traceability of food supply chain data through QR code labels.