How the Go Green Go Global Hackathon 2025 winning team is redefining trust in food supply chains
6 Mar 202610 min read
Summary
- Many institutional food programs rely on fragmented documentation such as invoices and certifications, which cannot fully verify sourcing, safety, or compliance across the entire supply chain.
- The winning team of the Go Green Go Global Hackathon 2025 developed a system that generates continuous, verifiable proof as food moves through the supply chain. Providing an end-to-end framework from procurement to preparation.
- Using GS1 standards, QR codes, and cryptographic labeling technology from GrailX, the system records sourcing, handling, and compliance data in real time, allowing operators and regulators to instantly verify information even in low-connectivity environments.
For much of modern trade, trust in food systems has been something inferred rather than demonstrated. Paper trails, certifications, and audits were designed to approximate reality after the fact. As supply chains stretched across borders and stakeholders multiplied, this retrospective approach became the default way to manage risk.Today, however, that model is under strain. Sustainability commitments, ESG reporting, and regulatory compliance are no longer peripheral concerns. They sit at the center of how food systems are governed.The Go Green Go Global Hackathon, organised by GS1 Singapore, was created to address this gap by encouraging innovators to develop solutions built on GS1’s global standards for product identification and supply chain data exchange. By grounding new technologies in these standards, the initiative aims to ensure that traceability solutions remain interoperable across real-world supply chains.In line with the aims of GS1, the winning team of the GS1 Singapore Go Green Go Global Hackathon 2025 argues that the gap between expectations and verification is not merely technical, but structural. It is most visible in institutional food programs — large-scale, often publicly funded food systems that supply meals to schools, hospitals, social welfare schemes, and other public institutions.
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“There’s a fundamental disconnect in global food supply chains, and it hits hardest at the people doing the work: the operators, farmers, and institutions who have no way to prove what they’ve accomplished,” the NDara team explained in a VCA email interview.
When compliance exists, but proof does not
The team grounds their critique in lived examples rather than theory, particularly within institutional food programs in Indonesia.These institutional kitchens, large-scale food service operations that prepare meals for public or semi-public programs, sit at the intersection of public policy and daily operations. They are asked to source responsibly, support local farmers, and meet safety standards, all while feeding large populations under tight budgets. On paper, they are a showcase of sustainability in action. In practice, they often become bottlenecks.
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“Take any institutional kitchen operator in Indonesia sourcing fresh, locally grown, organic ingredients, doing exactly what regulators and governments ask them to do. But when it comes time to get reimbursed by the relevant authority, they hit a wall. They can’t prove it. They have invoices, maybe some supplier certifications, but no end-to-end verification that the ingredients actually met the requirements. So they wait weeks or months for payment. Or they don’t get reimbursed at all,” the team said.
The issue is a lack of continuity. Invoices capture transactions. Certifications capture status at a point in time. Neither captures the full journey of food as it moves through farms, logistics providers, storage facilities, and kitchens. When verification is demanded retrospectively, operators are forced to reconstruct a narrative that the system itself never recorded.This creates a power imbalance. Operators must respond to questions long after the event, often without the data infrastructure to do so efficiently.
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“The burden falls on them to prove compliance, but they don’t have the infrastructure or expertise to do it. They’re food operators, not data managers. Meanwhile, small-scale farmers who supplied those ingredients get paid even later, or not fairly, because the supply chain is so fragmented that value gets lost in translation,” the team added.
Here, the cost of fragmentation becomes visible. Delayed reimbursement constrains cash flow for kitchens. Those delays ripple upstream, affecting farmers who depend on timely payment to sustain production. Over time, the system begins to disincentivize precisely the behaviors it claims to promote.
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“This is unjust and inefficient,” the team emphasized.
What makes this injustice particularly entrenched is that it is systemic rather than intentional. No single actor designs supply chains to delay payments or obscure value. Yet when proof is something that must be recreated after the fact, the system inevitably favors those with more resources, more documentation capacity, and more bargaining power.
Building proof into the flow of food
Rather than attempting to fix documentation at the margins, the team approached the problem from a different direction. They asked what would happen if proof were not something to be assembled later, but something generated continuously.
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“Here’s what our system does: it reverses the burden of proof. Instead of asking the kitchen operator to somehow reconstruct what happened, our system continuously verifies and attests to food safety, sourcing, and compliance in real-time. Every scan reveals an immutable, verifiable record: origin, certifications, handling, expiry, safety checks… all cryptographically validated,” the team noted.
This shift reframes accountability. Verification no longer depends on memory, paperwork, or reconstruction. It becomes an automatic byproduct of movement. As food changes hands, proof accumulates. As products are scanned, records are created. By the time oversight is required, the system already knows what happened. The Ndara team noted:
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“When reimbursement time comes, the operator doesn’t have to prove anything. The data is already there, already verified, already audit-ready. The funding agency can see exactly what was sourced, where it came from, whether it met standards, instantly. Reimbursement happens immediately, with confidence.”
This approach changes the relationship between operators and institutions. Now payment becomes procedural rather than discretionary.
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“The operator gets paid fairly and on time. The farmer gets paid fairly and on time. The end customer gets verified, safe, sustainable food. And the funding agency gets ironclad compliance proof,” the team explained.
Designing for this outcome required the team to confront how traceability systems fail in practice. Many collapse under complexity or require users to change how they work. Moreover, Instead of imposing new behaviors, the system integrates into existing ones. Scanning replaces form-filling. Familiar workflows remain intact. The technical sophistication remains largely invisible to the user. Connectivity, however, could not be assumed.
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“The internet isn’t reliable everywhere. So instead of building a system that requires constant cloud connectivity, we embedded critical data directly into and extract it from the QR code on the label, utilizing our partner GrailX’s revolutionary reader technolog.” the team said.
GrailX provides cryptographically secured, invisible labeling that allows product data to be verified directly from the label, even without constant internet access.By embedding data directly into the label, the system decouples verification from connectivity. Kitchens in remote regions can still access full traceability and compliance data. When connectivity returns, the system synchronizes and enriches records rather than blocking functionality.At the core of this architecture are GS1 identifiers such as GTIN and GS1 Digital Link, which allow each product, batch, and transaction to be uniquely identified and connected across supply chain systems. These globally recognised identifiers ensure that information captured by farmers, suppliers, kitchens, and regulators remains interoperable rather than confined within a proprietary platform.NDara’s hypergraph technology then coordinates these data points across stakeholders, creating a unified and audit-ready record while preserving compatibility with existing supply chain infrastructure.
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“This is an important misconception to clear up: GS1 standards didn’t limit us, they enabled us,” the Ndara team stressed.
GS1 standards provide a shared system for identifying products and capturing supply chain data across industries. Identifiers such as the Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) allow products to be recognised consistently across suppliers, logistics providers, retailers, and regulators, regardless of which internal systems each organisation uses.By building on these identifiers and GS1 Digital Link QR codes, the system ensures that data generated at different points in the supply chain remains interoperable rather than locked within a single platform. In practice, this means that information recorded at the farm, during transport, or inside institutional kitchens can be accessed and verified across stakeholders without requiring entirely new infrastructure.
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“Today, that intelligence lives in disconnected systems, if it exists at all. With our system, it’s one scan away, always available, verified at every step. - Winning the GS1 Go Green Go Global Hackathon validates something we’ve believed from the start: the future of food systems is accountability through visibility,” Ndara notes.
In conventional supply chains, information about sourcing, certification, and handling is often distributed across multiple databases, paper records, and internal systems. Even when data exists, it is rarely structured in a way that allows different actors in the supply chain to access and verify it consistently. If implemented at scale, systems built on interoperable standards could allow verification data to move with products rather than remain confined within individual organisations. When traceability and verification become embedded in the movement of goods, trust shifts from an abstract aspiration to something that can be observed, audited, and shared across stakeholders. In turn, this creates clearer conditions for accountability and fairness throughout the supply chain.
Why they stood out to the judges
For the judging panel, the differentiator was not novelty alone, but readiness. The hackathon was designed to encourage solutions that could be implemented using GS1 standards within real supply chain environments, rather than stand-alone technologies. Christopher Ang, CEO of GS1 Singapore and Chief Judge of the Hackathon, said the team stood out for its practical execution rather than conceptual ambition:
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“From the judging panel’s perspective, NDara differentiated itself through its clear real-world application, architectural completeness, and operational readiness. The team directly addressed the large-scale food safety and traceability gap within Indonesia’s public school meal programme.”
Unlike several solutions that remained largely theoretical, NDara presented what the panel viewed as a deployable framework. The project mapped how traceability could be implemented across procurement, distribution, and preparation in a real institutional setting. Ang emphasized that the solution was grounded in measurable objectives rather than general aspirations.
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“NDara set a measurable objective of achieving 60% traceable, locally sourced or organic ingredients using GS1-standard QR codes. Unlike solutions that were more conceptual, NDara presented a fully built, end-to-end framework covering procurement to preparation,” Ang noted.
That architectural completeness was critical. The judges were looking for coherence. Specifically a system that addressed upstream sourcing, midstream verification, and downstream reporting as part of a unified model. Equally important was resilience in real-world conditions.For institutional kitchens operating in remote areas, that capability was a practical necessity. The team’s use of GS1 standards also played a decisive role in the evaluation, as it ensured the solution could integrate with existing global supply chain systems rather than operate as a standalone platform.
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“The team’s integration of GS1 standards was fundamental to the evaluation. NDara embedded GS1 Digital Link QR codes and core Application Identifiers such as GTIN (AI 01), Batch/Lot (AI 10), Expiry (AI 17), and Serial (AI 21), ensuring structured, globally interoperable data capture,” Ang stressed.
Rather than treating standards as a constraint, the judges saw the solution as reinforcing interoperability across supply chain stakeholders. It did not replace existing systems, but extended them in ways that accelerated adoption.This combination of operational realism and standards-based interoperability ultimately set the project apart from other finalists.Looking beyond the competition itself, Christopher Ang noted that the project also showed clear potential for real-world deployment.
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“Looking beyond the hackathon, NDara demonstrated strong potential for real-world adoption because it was designed for field conditions and scalable implementation.”