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Trusted Supply Chain Data Is the Next Big Asset, says Trust Provenance CTO

May 7, 2025

Trusted Supply Chain Data: A Lightbulb Moment from Trust Provenance

Supply chains are all about ingredients, parts and products moving from one place to another—grain into bread, cattle into steak, oranges into supermarkets. Right?

Well, according to Harley Thomas, CTO for Australian traceability company Trust Provenance, there’s another valuable commodity flowing alongside the goods: trusted supply chain data.

"You’re not just selling a product anymore. Essentially and increasingly, you’ll be selling the data along with the product," Thomas says. "High-quality data is becoming just as important as high-quality goods."

The PyxGlobal team agrees.

It’s a simple insight with massive implications. Because as supply chains grow more complex—and demands for transparency, sustainability, and compliance multiply—the ability to easily, quickly, digitally, and verifiably prove where something came from, how it was made, and who touched it along the way is fast becoming non-negotiable.

And that’s where Trust Provenance sees opportunity to participate and contribute.

Moving Beyond Platform Capture

Based in Australia and focused largely on agriculture, Trust Provenance helps farmers and supply chains digitise and verify claims on goods for provenance, biosecurity and other traceability reasons. For years, they’ve built systems that make it easier to capture and share trustworthy information.

Trust Provenance is participating in the DAFF-funded AgTrace project, and when they encountered the United Nations Transparency Protocol (UNTP) and its extension, the Australian Agriculture Traceability Protocol (AATP), something clicked.

"It was very much a lightbulb moment for us," Thomas says. "We realised: this is how we skip the cumbersome and expensive system-to-system integration process that just isn't going to scale."

Instead of trying to jam every player in a supply chain into a single platform (a non-starter and anticompetitive to industry) the UNTP model offers an open, decentralised way to share verified information. Anyone can create verifiable credentials. Anyone can verify them—thereby collectively streamlining the process for producers, all supply chain partners and end customers. And that, Thomas believes, changes everything.

"That's a very powerful outcome," Thomas says. "We can navigate the data without forcing anyone onto our platform."

How One Digital ID Sparked a Lightbulb Moment

Thomas had been working his head around understanding the workings and potential of the UNTP, when a deceptively simple interaction gave him clarity on a technological problem he and his team had been especially keen on solving.

“Something that we've been really focused on, that we want to get really good at, is being able to pull a thread through all the different linked data sets across all the different solution providers for a client, to provide them with a summary of their supply chain information. Working with large retailers and supermarket chains, for example, that thread is long, complex and woven through diverse and disparate data sets, on different software systems,” explained Thomas.

As the AgTrace project progressed through its second pilot, Pyx CEO Zachary Zeus shared the digital ID created by the project participants.

“Our AgTrace Pilot Number 3 hadn’t yet begun, we weren’t even involved with Pilot Number 2 and didn’t yet know those organisations,” Thomas recalls. “Zach simply sent me an ID for the digital product passport in an email, without any special integration or setup. But because it’s based on the AATP and UNTP, and because of the way the protocol works, I was able to pull that thread. I could see all of the data all the way back up the supply chain."

“And we didn’t have to integrate with their systems to do it. I didn’t have to hop onto a phone call to discuss how we could share information with one another. There were no custom APIs required. That was very powerful," Thomas says. "It showed us that the UNTP isn’t just theory. It actually works. Following this we have built out a framework for a number of agricultural industries and are working now across different vendors and supply chain partners to bring more of this to life."

Good Data Will Define Good Business

Today, suppliers win contracts based on price, quality, or availability. Tomorrow, they could become a preferred supplier based on the quality and transparency of their trusted supply chain data.

"If you had two suppliers offering basically the same goods, but one gave you a QR code with verifiable data, and the other gave you a PDF in an email or offered to send you a fax—why would you pick the one making your life harder? It’s becoming clearer on what end customers want," Thomas said.

Retailers, manufacturers, and regulators are already grappling with the inefficiency of mismatched, messy supply chain data. Structured, verifiable data isn’t just a compliance burden—it’s also an operational optimisation advantage.

As global reporting requirements tighten around issues like carbon emissions, deforestation, and ethical sourcing, transparent data will become a ticket to trade.

Besides ESG imperatives, Thomas points out there’s a massive efficiency play: "You can’t keep scaling global supply chains on PDFs and faxes."

Trust Provenance’s Strategy for the Future

This isn’t a prediction, as Trust Provenance is participating in this forward-looking work as it unfolds. So, the company is maintaining its core business and growing in a related direction:

  • Core Farmer-Facing Tools – Apps that help producers, supply chains, processors and retailers to collect, manage and utilise digital information, build and manage digital product passports, manage sustainability information, and manage supply chain data—without drowning in the costs and time of complexity in the process.
  • In Development: The Trust Stack – A modular developer toolkit that will help others quickly spin up their own trust tools from digital product passports, to Link Resolvers and manage tools to streamline data management and align with the emerging global best practice for sharing data. Think of it like Shopify, which provides building blocks for building ecommerce stores, but for trusted supply chains.

Trust Provenance’s early adoption of open standards like UNTP reflects a bigger movement: a shift away from closed platforms and vendor lock-in, to one of trusted supply chain data shared via open platforms, low cost and globally scalable solutions. This shift will assist in the digital maturing of industries and supply chains, including mum and dad small family farmers whose raw products often make their way into finished products of global brand names and retailers that we all know.

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