About Ecolab
A trusted partner at more than one million customer locations, Ecolab is the global leader in water, hygiene and energy technologies and services that protect people and vital resources. With 2017 sales of $14 billion and 48,000 associates, Ecolab delivers comprehensive solutions and on-site service to promote safe food, maintain clean environments, optimize water and energy use and improve operational efficiencies for customers in the food, healthcare, energy, hospitality and industrial markets in more than 170 countries around the world.
Open Innovation Challenge:
Looking for offerings that turn input data from throughout the food supply chain into valuable insights for food retail and restaurants to improve:
- Traceability of food/ingredients to source
- Identification & management of causes of food safety and quality issues upstream in supply chain
Reason for Seeking External Innovation Partnership:
The rise of blockchain has spurred significant innovation around the area of food traceability. Much of the focus has been around tracing food safety issues back to the correct source as quickly as possible, so that outbreaks are contained and food waste and recalls are minimized The same technologies that enable this critical traceability will also enable a wide variety of data inputs to be passed along to different players in the food chain and a wide variety of insightful outputs based on that data. Ecolab is interested in hearing about any efforts to leverage this data exchange to create value for food retail and restaurant customers.
Scope of Solution Space:
- Solution must enable traceability at lower cost than existing solutions (e.g., smart barcode-based systems that are attached to pallets/bulk food packaging) to enable broad use.
- Solution should address not just supply chain destinations/verticals, but track handling through transition points in the supply chain, as well as relevant attributes/variables affecting food product to help trace issue causes/sources.
Innovation Solutions Not of Interest:
- Confidential information
Proposal Response Deadline:
April 30, 2019
Contact:
To submit your proposal online, click the link below:
Open Innovation Submission Form
To submit your proposal in a PDF document, click here.
