Open Arsenal

The Supply Chain Has Nothing to Hide – Anymore.

The Transparent Food Project is an open-source specification designed to create a public transparency layer for the global food supply chain. It enables communities, researchers, organizations, and developers to build systems that trace food movement, identify hidden import pathways, and analyze whether products have passed through foreign supply networks before reaching consumers. By combining open data, supply-chain mapping, and explainable intelligence, the project helps reveal the journey behind every product barcode.

The project focuses on import detection and supply-chain visibility rather than relying on marketing claims or certification labels. It reconstructs relationships between exporters, ports, importers, processors, warehouses, distributors, and retailers to identify potential relabeling, repackaging, and hidden sourcing patterns. Users can scan a product and receive transparent information about possible origin pathways, supporting evidence, and confidence levels behind each finding.

Built as a modular AGPL-3.0+ specification, The Transparent Food Project provides core components for product identification, entity resolution, supply-chain graph analysis, import detection, origin analysis, evidence tracking, and transparency APIs. Optional plugin modules extend the system with government data connectors, farm verification tools, retail integrations, IoT monitoring, distributed verification systems, and regional food network capabilities.

The goal of The Transparent Food Project is to create open infrastructure for food intelligence where supply-chain information is accessible, auditable, and community-driven. Instead of asking consumers to simply trust labels, the project provides tools to investigate the evidence behind them. By keeping the technology open and decentralized, anyone can participate in building a more transparent and accountable food system.

This specification is released under the AGPL-3.0+ license and is free to use with required attribution. Attribution-free deployments may obtain a Specification Branding License, with fees based on usage, deployment scope, and environment size.