Press release

17 May 2021 London, GB

Birra Peroni is the first industrial organization to mint unique non-fungible tokens using EY OpsChain Traceability

LONDON, 17 MAY 2021. EY today announced Birra Peroni, the Italian beer company part of Asahi Group, as the first industrial organization to use EY OpsChain Traceability to notarize information and tokenize goods leveraging non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Ethereum public blockchain.

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Ernst & Young Global Ltd.

  • EY OpsChain Traceability provides tokenization and notarization as a service on Ethereum blockchain for non-fungible tokens
  • Industrial companies can build customized supply chains and partner networks
  • New metadata standard proposed for tracking physical location of assets through tokens

EY today announced Birra Peroni, the Italian beer company part of Asahi Group, as the first industrial organization to use EY OpsChain Traceability to notarize information and tokenize goods leveraging non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Ethereum public blockchain. Birra Peroni is using EY OpsChain Traceability, an EY blockchain as-a-service offering on blockchain.ey.com to mint unique non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for each new batch of beer, enabling greater visibility and efficiency across its supply chain.

Federico Sannella, Corporate Affairs Director, Birra Peroni, says:

“For Birra Peroni, the bond with the agricultural supply chain and the quality of our 100% made-in-Italy malt are fundamental strategic assets. We believe that sustainability is deeply related to the respect for the raw material, and we wanted to bring this value alive to our consumers, allowing them to follow the journey of the malt from the field to the bottle. With EY OpsChain Traceability, we have found the ideal platform to carry out this important project. This is a major step forward in our commitment to bring visibility and transparency to our supply chain for both consumers and supply chain partners.”

EY OpsChain Traceability includes the ability to develop complex multi-stop supply chains, direct enterprise resource planning (ERP) integration through application programming interfaces and the ability to invite and collaborate with business partners. This solution addresses business expectations that are increasingly focused on operational efficiencies and transparency, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. According to “Enterprise commitment to blockchain remains strong” – a 2021 custom study commissioned by the EY organization and Dell – over 40% of blockchain decision-makers are planning to implement digitization and notarization of document use cases in the next 24 months.1

Paul Brody, EY Global Blockchain Leader, says:

“With EY OpsChain Traceability, we make it easy for enterprises to set up their operations and make the entire Ethereum blockchain an extension of their ERP environment. EY teams are committed not just to enabling business processes on the Ethereum blockchain, but to making the inputs and outputs properly tokenized and transactable. We envision a future where everything from inventory to purchase orders to invoices can be tokenized and integrated into a decentralized finance and business operations ecosystem.”

Giuseppe Perrone, EY EMEIA Blockchain Leader, says:

“EY OpsChain Traceability is enabling us to provide a much simpler way for organizations, such as Birra Peroni to build shared ecosystems around fungible and non-fungible tokens. With the ability for organizations to transact with one another through tokenized assets, anything from art, collectables and vaccines, EY blockchain-enabled solutions provide an efficient and secure environment to manage the transactions.”

The Birra Peroni traceability project included the participation of pOsti srl start up, which helped improve the user experience through supply chain assessment, landing page and multimedia components creation.

Virgilio Maretto, CEO of pOsti srl, says:

“A fully automated traceability process was implemented, starting with the acquisition of the information, its registration on the blockchain, and the processing and presentation on the landing page of significant data from the 100% Italian malt supply chain. With the help of innovative technologies, we created a highly customized landing page, offering an immersive and tailor-made customer experience. We expect that this Birra Peroni project becomes a best practice for companies that want to promote supply chain transparency through a process of traceability.”

In addition to the go-live of Birra Peroni on EY OpsChain Traceability, EY professionals also submitted an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) for location metadata standard to the Ethereum community as a proposed open, public domain standard. The implementation approach will allow companies to track asset physical location of tokens in a standardized, globally accepted way. The draft EIP documentation can be found on GitHub.

 

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