As part of the global efforts on sustainable development and establishing a cleaner and fairer industry, many sectors are under intense pressure to transform their core operations. Accustomed to pressing small suppliers and always targeting maximum economies of scale, the food industry also faces the challenge of becoming more sustainable and fairer to its stakeholders.
OURZ, a start-up headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, aims to provide the necessary tools to food producers, processors, wholesale and retail chains so they can easily transition to a more transparent, greener and equitable supply chain.
For its core web-based product, in June 2021 OURZ chose ITIDO as its trusted technology partner. The main reason: ITIDO has the right technology profile as well as proven experience in anti-food waste applications like Olanga and agritech platforms like Agriniser.
The challenge
OURZ operates web applications for food producers and processors as well as an interface for end consumers. Food companies can sign up on the platform, establish so-called coalitions that are made up of the stakeholders along the supply chain, and, ultimately, create digital twins of their products. For their part, users can scan the QR code of each relevant package they see while shopping and receive rich information about that item’s origin and ingredients.
The platform is underpinned by blockchain Linux infrastructure that generates unique, tamper-proof IDs for every batch of a given food or drink. While the blockchain and the web app’s technology stack are somehow separate, ITIDO takes care of the application that was developed by a different company. We are making sure the application is bug-free, stable, and scalable in light of the customer feedback and the growing business opportunities before OURZ.
One of the critical aspects is that the Angular front end of the app is getting old – nowadays most developers know that new versions of Angular are released quite often and old ones get deprecated relatively quickly.
Moreover, different corporate customers have different distributions of the application so that makes support and maintenance a very complicated task. On top of that challenge, there was no pre-existing staging environment so the engineering team is very careful what code changes go on the production sites.
The ITIDO solution
Starting in July 2021, ITIDO assembled a team with a few full-stack engineers and a delivery manager to take care of the platform. Following Agile practices like Scrum sprints and the ceremonies therein, the ITIDO team with the help of the OURZ Product Owner managed to clear up a backlog of reported bugs, particularly on the front end. Тhat made the user experience smoother.
It never felt hard that we collaborated remotely. ITIDO’s know-how in web and latest JavaScript frameworks is just outstanding.
Claas H Nieraad, Investor and Member of the Board, OURZ GmbH
The unique blockchain-based architecture of the app allows creativity in adding various new features. We updated and sorted data coming from the blockchain to the various web components, and later we re-designed the user flow so as to reduce the risk of confusion when using the app.
Users are now provided with many desired options – like tracking each batch of food, getting extra information on local producers and the “story behind” each item. User experience is now made richer and more organized – QR codes and the intuitive menu help a lot. The versatility of the newly added features combined with the stability of Angular ITIDO achieved guarantee an awesome end result.
Technologies and processes we used
- Node
- Typescript
- Angular v5
- AWS
- DynamoDB
- Blockchain on a Linux infrastructure
- Bitbucket
The OURZ product achievements in 2021
- +550% revenue
- +663% clients
- +530% batches
- +433% scans