Digital contracts are an important tool for reducing transaction costs between buyers and sellers in the food chain and ensuring compliance with international trading laws. To this end, ICT start-up Plataforma Agrocontratación (AgroC) has developed a platform to facilitate efficient and transparent transactions within the meat sector.

Experience shows that the platform meets a pressing need. Since a new EU directive established a minimum list of unfair trading practices in the agri-food supply chain in 2019, the Spanish agency responsible for administering EU legislation has imposed more than 1,900 sanctions, including fines in excess of EUR 11 million.

AgroC has established a testing environment and R&D roadmap to update its platform with new technologies, such as blockchain. However, to ensure the best value from future investments, the company needs to validate the needs of the meat sector, including requirements for legislative compliance.

In this exploration project, AgroC has been working with three partners to review legal aspects, develop technical updates and finalise the testing process, so the platform can be launched on the market.

After the testing and improvements done with the resources of this project, AgroC has a solution that has proved to generate value to allow the first commercial clients, and with the legal information and the repository of resources is capable of adapting services for smaller SMEs, generating the first resources to continue investment in the company business plan and the R&D roadmap.