Photo by Caroline Attwood on Unsplash

A traceability platform for social responsibility.

Today, it’s more important than ever before to understand where stuff comes from.

Bret Waters
2 min readFeb 11, 2021

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I used to eat food without thinking much about where it came from. I was like a Labrador — if you put food in front of me, I ate it. That was that.

Today, of course, we’ve become very aware of the importance of understanding the sourcing of what we eat. And not just food — we want to know that all the products we buy come from a supply chain free of child labor, contamination, and other negative externalities.

Peer Ledger, a tech company in Canada, has developed a software platform to help organizations to ensure traceability through their supply chain. With the Peer Ledger platform, companies can assure customers that they are upholding social values while at the same time de-risking their supply chains.

Peer Ledger does this by using Blockchain technology to create an immutable record of transactions, documents, and metrics across the supply chain. While many people hear “Blockchain” and think “cryptocurrency”, Peer Ledger is one of the many companies today using Blockchain technology for applications well beyond financial services.

Peer Ledger was founded by Dr. Dawn Jutla, who holds a PhD in Computer Science and is an expert in technology strategy. She’s put together a great team focused on helping companies to manage their supply chains for social responsibility and regulatory compliance.

Their customers include companies across several different sectors, from food to precious metals. For food companies they can map the entire chain from “farm to fork”, for gold companies they can trace gold bars from mines to Swiss vaults, ensuring the integrity of the process and sources.

They’ve even launched a new product in response to the Covid pandemic, giving health authorities more actionable data as vaccine shipments are expedited through complex supply chains.

What Peer Ledger is doing is really important stuff. Because with food, drugs, and many other products, we all want to understand how things are sourced today.

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Bret Waters

Silicon Valley guy. Teaches at Stanford. Eats fish tacos.