How to save the tea industry?
Tea, as one of the worlds three major non-alcoholic beverages alongside coffee and cocoa, has a history of more than 6,000 years. As the representative and epitome of Chinese culture, a wide variety of tea not only has many fans in China, but also goes abroad to the international market, becoming an important commodity in the economic and trade exchanges between countries and regions along the Belt and Road.
In recent years, with Chinas increasing efforts to open up to the outside world, the rapid rise in international status and reputation has also brought huge market potential and new development opportunities to Chinas traditional tea industry. However, for ordinary consumers, they do not know whether tea is good or bad, let alone whether the tea brand is genuine or not. As a result, many merchants, driven by high profits, use low-quality fake and inferior tea as shoddy tea, which not only causes harm to consumers, but also causes double losses of brand and profit to formal enterprises that are dedicated to making tea, and is even more detrimental. The sound development of the entire industry.
If the ancient tea industry wants to truly become internationalized and standardized, it must solve industry problems such as chaotic market prices, difficulty in distinguishing true from false, unclear origin, and lack of uniform industry standards.
Bad money drives out good money, and the tea industry urgently needs to destroy the old and establish the new
When buying tea, there is a phenomenon that bothers many consumers. The price of the same origin and type of tea ranges from dozens to hundreds of dollars. Under the smart tongue promotion of merchants, it is impossible to distinguish which are low-end and inferior teas and which are high-end and expensive teas. It is precisely because of the lack of transparency in the traditional tea market that information in various links cannot be shared with each other and price standards are difficult to unify, which has led to consumers lack of trust in the quality of tea. Many Internet celebrity teas, such as Puer tea and Wuyi tea, are famous because of their reputation, which has led to the emergence of counterfeit and shoddy products, which has greatly affected the development of the tea industry.
At the same time, under the current business model, when a dispute arises in a certain link of the industrial chain, due to poor information traceability, investigation and accountability, proof of responsibility and problem tracing are time-consuming and labor-intensive, resulting in low cost and low risk of fraud. Fake and shoddy products are still rampant.
Secondly, the tea supply chain is a complicated circulation process, which needs to integrate production links such as tea gardens and tea factories, product links such as design and development, and circulation links such as warehousing logistics, merchants, and customers. This long and complex supply chain is bound to be accompanied by various problems.
In the supply chain, tea planting, harvesting and processing have an important impact on the quality of tea; and the existing methods of packaging, storage, logistics and sales of tea make it difficult for tea products to remove the fake and keep the real. Therefore, under the background of weak supervision and weak consumers ability to distinguish, the phenomenon of tea does not match the reality is endless.
Furthermore, due to the lengthy industrial chain of the tea industry and the large number of participants, the data in most links including tea gardens, tea factories, multi-level distributors, sales terminals and consumers are isolated islands of information, and sharing and interoperability have not been realized. As a result, the efficiency of information transmission is low, and information is easy to be tampered with and lost, which affects the operational efficiency of the entire industry and leads to a substantial increase in the risks of processing, production, inventory management, and marketing.
Finally, due to the information asymmetry in each link of the tea industry chain and the lack of an effective information sharing and trust mechanism, it is difficult for credit institutions to lend and financing is difficult and expensive. Moreover, tea is a seasonal product, and the peak production season is separated from the peak sales season, which also leads to tight funds for tea factories and weak ability to resist risks.
The blockchain reconstructs the tea industry chain, revitalizing the ancient tea industry
As the next-generation disruptive black technology with high expectations, blockchain is not only an underlying technology, but more importantly, it can restructure business organizations and be widely used in various industries. Even the traditional tea industry with a history of thousands of years can develop with high quality and efficiency in the direction of digitalization and intelligence under the empowerment of blockchain.
1. Give each tea a unique ID
For tea anti-counterfeiting, laser anti-counterfeiting labels and digital anti-counterfeiting labels are commonly used in the market. Although the price is low, the anti-counterfeiting performance is useless, and it is easy to be copied in batches; some of the counterfeiting verification operations are relatively complicated, which brings great inconvenience to consumers.
Under the empowerment of the blockchain, an anti-counterfeit traceability scheme of one object, one code can be adopted to eliminate the problem of counterfeiting from the source through a unique ID that cannot be copied and tampered with. Not only can it achieve effective anti-counterfeiting, but it can also add origin information, brand stories, tea-frying techniques and other content to the label to further enhance consumers stickiness to the brand.
2. Supply chain whole process management
The blockchain can provide a traceable management system for the whole process from tea picking to consumer purchase, and record the information of each link from the production, processing, testing, transportation, warehousing to shelf sales of goods, so that Consumers can understand the status information of each transaction link of tea in real time, and the data collected in real time can also help enterprises fully control the production and sales process of tea.
In the stage of tea picking, trace back the raw material processing site of the product, determine the information of the raw material base, including the area and output of the tea garden, organize picking and primary processing according to the standard requirements, and ensure that the raw materials produced by the primary production are packaged and affixed with a traceability code before entering the tea. library.
In the finished product processing stage, the production is organized in strict accordance with the standard process flow, the product quality is strictly controlled, and traceable anti-counterfeiting labels are established to provide guarantee for the sales transaction of tea.
In the terminal sales stage, the tea sales model based on blockchain technology can be carried out without a centralized platform or a third-party payment platform, and only requires point-to-point transactions.
In addition, the characteristics of data immutability and timestamp existence proof possessed by blockchain technology can well resolve disputes among participants in the supply chain system, and realize easy proof and accountability. The application of blockchain will significantly improve the efficiency of tea supply chain management, thereby improving the overall work efficiency of tea enterprises.
3. Consumer inquiry screening
In the terminal purchase link, when the product information is uploaded to the chain, the entire industrial chain becomes open and transparent. Up to the source tea factory, down to the products in the hands of consumers, the circulation and transaction information of each step can be queried, thereby infinitely reducing the possibility of counterfeiting. When consumers purchase tea, they can scan the unique ID that comes with the tea with their mobile phones to realize the authenticity and traceability of the tea.
At the same time, this will also solve the credit problem that plagues the development of the tea industry to the greatest extent. The open, transparent and non-tamperable nature of the blockchain ensures the accuracy of the information to the greatest extent, greatly reducing the risk of counterfeiting.
4. Say goodbye to difficult and expensive financing
Blockchains distributed ledger technology, encrypted ledger structure technology, and smart contract technology, etc., are solutions to solve traditional supply chain financial information asymmetry, credit inability to transfer, and payment and settlement solutions. Use blockchain technology to provide real-time records of all links in the tea industry chain, break the original scattered and incommunicable data mode, improve efficiency through smart contracts, and reduce the risk of lending; at the same time, it also reduces the risk of repeated pledges, thus effectively solving the problem of small and medium-sized enterprises. Difficulties in corporate financing.
5. Provide tools for science regulation
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With the help of blockchains decentralization, collaborative sharing, non-tamperable and traceable characteristics, it is possible to realize the traceability of the entire industrial chain from tea planting and picking, to processing and packaging, to warehousing and logistics, and to reconstruct the supply of the tea industry Chain system, establish and improve the trust mechanism, thereby reducing the transaction cost of tea and the dissemination cost of tea culture, and build a new tea industry ecology that is highly compatible with the intelligent digital era.
Since its establishment, Wanglian Technology has always been committed to using blockchain technology to empower the development of traditional industries. VoneTracer, a blockchain traceability platform with independent intellectual property rights, applies industry-leading technology and adopts a variety of data collection methods. Process Tracking and Product Traceability of products. At present, it has successfully served many large enterprises such as Yihai Kerry, ZTE Energy, Baoli Jiahua, etc., and has excellent experience in overcoming the pain points of traditional industry development and providing traceable blockchain application solutions for the whole life cycle.
In the field of tea industry, Wanglian Technology will actively explore the combination of blockchain + tea industry in the future by virtue of its advanced self-developed technology and rich landing solutions, and open up the process from tea planting and picking, to processing and transportation, to marketing and sales. The whole industry chain realizes resource integration, information sharing, and promotes the transformation and upgrading of the ancient tea industry.
