The watchword is sustainability. But also traceability, transparency, technology. Put them all together GenuineWay, a start-up specialising in themes ESG Environmental, Social and Governance.
Imagine you're going to the supermarket to buy a bottle of apple cider vinegar. In your head, a little voice starts to wonder: “But what's really inside this vinegar? Will it be Italian apples? And where will they come from?” Now, at this point, imagine taking your smartphone out of your pocket and using the QR code reader to scan the code on the’digital label on the bottle. In just a few seconds – perhaps only one – you'll have the answers to all your questions. The exact origin of the apples – and we mean that literally: the very soil on which the trees grow, in that precise part of that precise region –; how, when and by whom they are cultivated; how, when and by whom they are harvested; how, when and by whom they are transported, etc. In short, a sort of virtual passport for the product, which ensures real-time and transparent tracking of the entire supply chain, accessible with a single click. Fast, rapid, secure, and green. This is the GenuineWay idea explained.
This clarifies everything for us. Amelia Bassini, COO & Co-founder of this young company.
“GenuineWay arrived on the market in 2020, a few weeks before the outbreak of the pandemic – explains Bassini. We felt the need to to combine the company's need to highlight its excellent production chain with the consumer's need to receive true and real data on the origin and entire journey of the products they purchased. In short, we wanted to help businesses become more transparent regarding the environmental and social impact of their production, countering greenwashing. But there was a problem: to do so, a solution was needed that wasn't too expensive for them, nor too cumbersome to implement, and Really transparent. We found it in the blockchain technology, a sophisticated database mechanism that allows for secure and transparent data exchange, precisely”.
GenuineWay is therefore born as ESG-focused blockchain provider, which helps companies communicate their choices vertically, from supplies to product transformation and eco-sustainability, to offer greater transparency to the consumer and their B2B partners.
In three years, the start-up has grown exponentially, now involving major entrepreneurial entities, and not just in the food sector. “GenuineWay's proposals were created to support businesses in digitalising and communicating the values of their products in terms of environmental, social, and economic sustainability,” Bassini continues. "Obviously, the food sector is the most rapid and intuitive to apply, especially when we think of Italian excellence in this field, but it is certainly not the only one: the cosmetics or fashion markets can also tell their values and their ESG commitment through our talking label; even public administrations, with whom we find ourselves collaborating more and more often, can use our solutions to propose or encourage sustainable behaviours.".
An example is the case of’BeviMi app, a project co-financed by Fondazione Cariplo and supported by Coripet, promoted by CICMA, a Lombard association for water protection, with the Milanese universities Milano-Bicocca, Statale, and Politecnico. The idea was to create an app that would encourage students to use the water dispensers installed at the three university campuses to refill their water bottles and thus avoid the use of plastic bottles. The solution proposed by GenuineWay was precisely the BeviMi app which, through a points-based game, pushes young people to a special sustainability competition, complete with rankings and final winners. “Another very recent case study involving the public sector is the innovative project we've launched with H-Farm," Bassini tells us, referring to the university technology campus founded a few years ago in Veneto, with which we have started the Treeceable platform which allows for the tracking of trees within the park at the site, to monitor the CO2 impact of individual plants by scanning a QR code that provides citizens or park visitors with data on the various trees present.
What if it was the waste that was being tracked? Think, for example, about the water bottle you've just sorted into your plastic recycling bin – wouldn't it be interesting (and useful) to know its final destination once it's been processed and recycled? With the solution proposed by GenuineWay, this is possible. “A prime example of our system's application is precisely in waste tracking," explains Bassini: "in fact, this is one of the challenges we are setting for local authorities. Using blockchain technology, we could indeed get to know the sources of origin and the various percentages of raw materials used to make a recycled object. So, for example, you could buy a jar made from recycled plastic and know, via an app that reads a digital label, that the plastic comes from that specific region, was collected and processed in that plant, sorted in that area, and so on.
In short, in the world of private digitalisation, but also and above all in that of the public sector, which is tasked with finding green solutions to reduce final costs for users and offer increasingly efficient and transparent services, Genuine Way becomes an’Technological opportunity to tell the ESG value behind every choice or project. For more information on the proposed solutions, visit the website www.genuineway.io
