Agriculture · Supply chain traceability
A produce recall takes three days when lot records live in a spreadsheet
Banao builds farm-to-buyer traceability for agribusinesses, food processors, and export aggregators — linking each lot to its plot, treatment history, cold-chain readings, and grading result, so a quality query is answered in minutes rather than days.
The system writes a chain of custody at every handoff: harvest, pack-house intake, cold-store entry, dispatch, and buyer receipt. Export paperwork is generated from that record, not keyed in by hand before the shipment leaves.
What a Banao traceability deployment covers
Farm-to-buyer traceability spans four distinct data problems. We build the connective tissue that ties them into one queryable record.
Plot-level lot assignment at harvest
Each harvest batch is assigned a lot number linked to its GPS-tagged plot, crop variety, input log, and harvest date — the root record that every downstream entry traces back to.
Pack-house and grading integration
Weight, grade, packing date, and any treatment applied at the pack-house write directly into the lot record — no parallel clipboard, no end-of-day data entry.
Cold-chain monitoring and alerts
Temperature and humidity sensors report at each storage and transport leg. Excursions write an event into the lot's chain of custody and trigger an alert before the shipment moves to the next stage.
Recall-ready querying
A contamination event triggers a query, not a paper hunt — which lots share the plot, pack date, or pack-house run, and where each is now. The answer is in seconds, not days.
Export and regulatory document generation
Phytosanitary certificates, country-of-origin declarations, and buyer-mandated quality documents are generated from the lot record automatically — removing the hand-keying that causes errors and delays at the border.
Buyer and retailer portal
Buyers and retail procurement teams see inbound lot status, cold-chain history, and compliance documents in a read-only portal — reducing inbound queries and shortening payment cycles tied to documentation approval.
We run AI-tracked operations before we sell them
Banao is a ~300-person engineering company that runs its own demand-gen, hiring, and delivery operations on AI it built. Vikaas — our demand-gen AI — tracks every lead through its pipeline with the same event-chain logic we apply to a produce lot. We know what it takes to keep a record clean under real operational pressure, because our own operations depend on it.
When we design a lot-tracking system for a food processor, we are not theorising from first principles. We are applying the same discipline we apply to our own tracked systems every working day.
- VikaasTracks Banao's own demand-gen pipeline from first touch to signed contract.
- InterviewGodScreens Banao's own engineering hires — every event logged against every candidate record.
When traceability AI is the wrong starting point
A traceability platform is only as good as the data going in. We will say this clearly before you build:
- Unstructured upstream: if harvest records are verbal and pack-house logs are paper, the first problem is a field-capture workflow — not a platform. The Discovery Sprint will surface this in week one.
- Small volume, single buyer: below a certain throughput, a shared spreadsheet protocol with a committed buyer is cheaper and faster to implement. We will tell you if that is your case.
- No cold-chain hardware: temperature monitoring requires sensors at each leg. If that infrastructure does not exist or cannot be funded, the cold-chain slot in the traceability record stays empty — we will not paper over it.
How we start — map the chain before you build the platform
We do not quote a traceability platform without first walking the actual handoff chain.
- AI Discovery Sprint2 weeks · fixed price
We walk your harvest, pack-house, cold-store, and dispatch flow, map every data handoff, identify the two or three gaps that cause most trace failures, and hand back a system design and ROI estimate — yours to keep. If you proceed, the Sprint fee is credited against the build.
- Build
Build the lot-record database, connect field-capture tools (mobile app, weighbridge, sensor feeds), wire in cold-chain hardware where present, and integrate with your ERP or buyer EDI where required.
- Go-live and document automation
Train field supervisors and pack-house staff, go live with the chain of custody, and activate export-document generation from day one. A first recall drill confirms the query returns correct results before we hand over.
Frequently asked questions
How do you capture data at harvest — do workers need smartphones?
We design for the lowest-friction capture point available: QR-tagged trays and a basic Android app where smartphone penetration is high; weighbridge and pack-house terminal integrations elsewhere. The Discovery Sprint identifies the right input method for each handoff in your specific chain.
Does the system cover exports to GCC and EU markets?
Yes. We design the lot record to hold the fields required for common export destinations — phytosanitary declarations, treatment history, country of origin, and grade — and generate compliant PDFs from those fields. Format compliance for a specific buyer or border authority is confirmed in the Discovery Sprint.
What happens to historical data — can old lots be back-entered?
Old records can be imported in bulk from spreadsheets where those records exist and are structured consistently. We do this during the build phase. Incomplete historical data is flagged rather than silently omitted, so the audit trail is honest about what predates the system.
How does a recall query actually work?
You enter a lot identifier, a date range, or a pack-house run and the system returns every affected lot, where each is in the supply chain now, and which downstream buyers have received it. The query runs in seconds. The same result exports as a PDF or CSV for the regulator or buyer.
Can buyers or retailers access the data directly?
Yes — a read-only buyer portal is a standard deliverable. Buyers see inbound lot status, cold-chain readings, grade, and compliance documents without calling your team. Access is lot-scoped and revocable; you control what each buyer can see.
Walk your supply chain once. Know where every lot is from then on.
In 45 minutes we will map your current handoff chain, identify the gaps that create trace failures, and tell you what a traceability system would cost to build and operate.
Book a 45-min scoping call