Leveraging Blockchain in the Food Industry | The Case of NEM, LoyalCoin, Pundi X

Various businesses from the food industry have set up booths at the recently held Food and Drinks Expo and the Asia Food Expo. (Yes, there were two food-related events this September 2018, and why not.) Unsurprising, it’s an expo to showcase their products. Walk on the aisles, try the food here and there, and a food enthusiast would notice unfamiliar names in both events. Pundi X, LoyalCoin, NEM at the Asia Food Expo. LoyalCoin & NEM at the Food and Drinks Expo.

These companies are familiar to BitPinas readers. LoyalCoin is a rewards platform built on the blockchain. Pundi X has a point of sale product to facilitate crypto payments, also built on the blockchain. NEM is the blockchain where the former two projects are built on top of.

You might be asking. What are these blockchain companies doing in a FOOD and DRINKS Expo? Read on.

This is an original article published by BitPinas on September 21, 2018. We politely request that you attribute our website if you are going to source this article.

What is Blockchain?

Blockchain, in its simplest meaning, is a record of transactions on a distributed ledger. All these thousands of ledgers have the same copy of the records (recorded in blocks), thereby making the record immune to tampering.

The regular person might still find that meaning complicated. It’s like the Internet in the 90s. We couldn’t understand how it works and how email could be sent from New York to Manila faster than our dial-up modem speed.

Today, however, many still do not understand how the Internet works or how emails are sent. It’s just there. We can’t understand them but we use them daily.

And that’s what this writer thinks will happen in the future. The majority will still do not understand blockchain, but the majority will be using applications built from it.

Pundi X

Let’s look at Pundi X. Pundi XPOS is a POS solution that allows a restaurant to accept not just VISA/Mastercard but also cryptocurrency. It can support Alipay, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, really all these payment channels in one place. There’s a portion on the XPOS screen that allows advertisements for additional revenue.

Cryptocurrency holders have been complaining that they can’t use their tokens anywhere. Well, here’s Pundi X. The customer can pay with crypto, the merchant has all forms of payment in one place. There is no need for a separate POS for Alipay, etc. Pundi has all of them.

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LoyalCoin

While Pundi X is focused on the payment system, LoyalCoin is focused on rewards. It’s a loyalty platform on the blockchain. Again, blockchain. “I don’t understand,” a restaurant owner will say. Think of SM advantage cards. You get points for every purchase. Think of Starbucks. You get a “star” for every purchase. That star and those points can be “redeemed” later once you accumulated enough.

LoyalCoin is an all-in-one rewards platform. All the participating merchants in the platform give you loyalcoins for every purchase. And since they all give loyalcoins, you can freely choose as to which merchant would you like to redeem those coins. (Note that I do not need to put the word “blockchain” in my sentence when I explain it.)

Think about it, how many years does it take you to accumulate SM advantage points worth something? If more merchants use 1 rewards platform, accumulation of points will be faster. Redeeming these points will be faster. This gives the consumer the incentive to accumulate more because they can use it quickly. This benefits the merchant in terms of increased sales.

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NEM

Powering Pundi and LoyalCoin is the NEM blockchain. NEM also has a token, by the way, called XEM. And many have been criticizing the NEM foundation for not promoting their tokens enough. There are so many cryptocurrencies right now, from bitcoin to Ethereum to Cardano to OX to Lord knows who came up with these names.

Ask yourself, however, from all the 892 blockchain projects whose tokens are listed in Coinmarketcap, how many of them have working products? How many have real-life use cases? Maybe these other blockchain projects are harder to work on, or maybe not. Many projects have been built on top of the ethereum blockchain and that’s not up for debate. Yet, here’s Pundi X and LoyalCoin and many other projects built on the NEM blockchain. Why is that? Here’s NEM Philippines’ Emerson Fonseca to talk about it:

“NEM Blockchain is a very flexible and a very easy platform. You do not need to hire developers that need to learn a new programming language that is still “exploratory” and “hard to use”. With NEM, you can use the same talents you have that knows any programming language and can easily connect it thru the NEM Blockchain via API calls.”

As for the 892 blockchain projects, think about which projects will survive ones the hype is over.

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Food and Drinks Expo & Asia Food Expo

And so at the Food and Drinks Expo and the Asia Food Expo, they presented NEM-powered Pundi X and LoyalCoin which both can be used to complement any existing food business.

• A restaurant can use Pundi X for their POS.
• Or they can be part of the LoyalCoin platform.
• A food company may use NEM to maintain a better record of transactions immune to altering.
• A supermarket may use NEM in their supply chain to ensure that a certain product is really what it is.
  • For example, in verifying if a fruit is really organic or not by tracing in which farm it originated from.

It is important to note that these projects are not actually food-centric. Pundi and LoyalCoin can be used by other businesses in other industries. In fact, NEM was used for a voting trial in Ukraine, ensuring that there’s one vote per person and no one who’s dead is voting.

You see, the above are just a few examples of how blockchain can be applied in many other industries, our article is just focused on food. There might be questions on the merchant side, like implementation and manpower, but on the side of the consumer, does the customer needs to know that a restaurant’s POS/Rewards Promo run on the blockchain?

Absolutely not.