GS1 HK's Food Safety Forum 2024 Underlined Effective Adoption of Digital Technology to Uphold Food Safety and Sustainability

HONG KONG, Aug. 23, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- The 10^th edition of GS1 Hong Kong Food Safety Forum concluded successfully today, drawing more than 200 attendees from the food and catering industry to join in-person. Ms. Diane Wong, Under Secretary for Environment and Ecology of the HKSAR Government, kick-started the event as the Guest of Honour. Mr. Anthony Li, Deputy Secretary for Environment and Ecology (Food) of the HKSAR Government, Hon. Peter Shiu, Legislative Councilor (Wholesale and Retail) were also on-site as Award Presenters to give out recognitions to 31 outstanding "Quality Food Scheme" companies, including the new "Quality Food Scheme ESG" launched this year.

Environmental Protection Department recorded that some 3,300 tonnes of food waste, about 30% of municipal solid waste, are disposed at landfills each day, which is not sustainable and is environmentally undesirable as it depletes the limited landfill space^[1]. Themed "Rethinking our Future: Where Food Safety and Sustainability Meet", this year's GS1 HK Food Safety Forum focus on the challenges of the local food supply chain, and the sustainable development of the food sector ecosystem.

The guest of honour of the event, Ms. Diane Wong, said in the opening remarks, "Advanced technology plays an important role in food safety and sustainability. It can help preserve the environment and improve traceability throughout the food supply chain. Advanced technology can also help reduce food loss and waste by improving storage, handling, and distribution practices. We hope that the food manufacturing industry can continue to explore how the effective adoption of international standards and technologies can help address challenges in food traceability and safety, and also promote sustainable development for the food safety regime. The Government will continue to review the existing policies and measures to ensure that food safety and hygiene standards are met and consumers in Hong Kong can have access to safe and high quality food products."

Building a Safe and Sustainable Food Ecosystem with Technology

Mr. Keith Wu, Chairman of GS1 HK's Food and Beverage Industry Advisory Board, highlighted the importance of the sustainability of local food ecosystem in his welcome remarks, "Consumers behavior has shifted significantly, with sustainability becoming a priority in purchasing decisions. Regulations over ESG & sustainability are also becoming increasingly common worldwide, making sustainability no longer a choice, but a business imperative, just like food safety. "Traceability" & "transparency" are always the essential pillars to achieve food safety & sustainability goals. Food industry stakeholders have a shared responsibility to continuously strive towards these goals."

He cited GS1 HK's "1QR", a QR code with GS1 Digital Link standard, as a good way to promote food safety and sustainability. Retailers can scan the "1QR" at check-out counter and shows the 'Best Before' or 'Sell By' dates – allowing expired foods to be rejected at checkout, and those close to expiry to be sold at a bargain – to reduce food waste.

On the other hand, consumers can simply scan the "1QR" with a smart phone to access information like nutritional values, industry certifications, allergy advice, etc., and also the sustainability details such as sources of materials, carbon footprint, recycling method, helping to uplift consumers' confidence and attachment.

Senior executives from Data Literacy Association, FrieslandCampina (Hong Kong) Ltd., Kerry Logistics (HK) Limited, Maxim's Caterers Ltd., Swire Coca-Cola HK, Tai Po Chun Hing Ltd., Uni-China Group and Wong & Associates Global Ltd. shared their insights at the Forum, exploring how the effective adoption of international standards and digital technologies can assist the industry in ensuring food safety and promote a sustainable future.

The New "Quality Food Scheme ESG"

The new "Quality Food Scheme ESG" has awarded 17 enterprises with recognition, which are assessed mainly in accordance with GS1 Global Traceability Standard (GTS), MSCI ESG Indexes^[2] and United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs)^[3] etc. The scheme aims to encourage businesses to not only put efforts in food traceability and safety, but also act on ESG practices.

Quality Food Scheme has been evolving since 2015 that also covers "Quality Food Scheme" and "Quality Food Scheme Plus". The 2 schemes have recognised 21 companies this year. Please refer to appendix for the awardee list, and visit https://www.gs1hk.org/quality-food-scheme for details of Schemes.

Ms. Anna Lin, Chief Executive of GS1 HK, noted, "I'm very pleased to see the encouraging responses for our inaugural "Quality Food Scheme ESG" from the industry, which shows their commitment to sustainable development. We will continue to work with all the parties, by means of consultation, training and award schemes, to elevate food safety standard and more sustainable practices.

Photos download: https://gs1hongkong.box.com/s/xuadt1xh6n4hviwyqwst20atz7j4ikfw

Remarks：

[1] Environmental Protection Department: https://shorturl.at/DqbRk

[2] MSCI ESG Index: https://bit.ly/47vsvfd

[3] United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/

Appendix

Recognised Companies of "Quality Food Scheme Plus" 2024 (in alphabetical order):

Diamond Enterprise

Gold Enterprise

Recognised Companies of "Quality Food Scheme" 2024 (in alphabetical order):

Gold Enterprise

Silver Enterprise

Recognised Companies of "Quality Food Scheme ESG" 2024 (in alphabetical order):

Innovation

Technology

Achievement

About GS1 Hong Kong

Founded by the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce in 1989, GS1 Hong Kong is the local chapter of GS1®. GS1 Hong Kong's mission is to empower businesses of their digital transformation, improve supply chain visibility and efficiency, ensure product authenticity, facilitate commerce connectivity and enable sustainable value chain through the provision of global supply chain standards (including GTIN & barcodes), and a full spectrum of platforms, solutions and services.

GS1 Hong Kong currently supports close to 8,000 corporate members from 20 sectors including retail & consumer packaged goods, food & beverage and food services, healthcare, apparel & footwear, logistics & ICT. By working closely with communities of trading partners, industry organizations, government, and technology providers, we can foster a collaborative ecosystem, paving the way for "Smarter Business, Better Life".

Headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, GS1® is a not-for-profit, standards organisation that has 118 national chapters serving 150 economies globally. For more information, please visit www.gs1hk.org.

** The press release content is from PR Newswire. Bastille Post is not involved in its creation. **

GS1 HK's Food Safety Forum 2024 Underlined Effective Adoption of Digital Technology to Uphold Food Safety and Sustainability

GS1 HK's Food Safety Forum 2024 Underlined Effective Adoption of Digital Technology to Uphold Food Safety and Sustainability

GS1 HK's Food Safety Forum 2024 Underlined Effective Adoption of Digital Technology to Uphold Food Safety and Sustainability

SINGAPORE, Sept. 13, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- HTX Ventures, the global investment division of HTX, today released its latest research analysing Bitcoin's potential and challenges in the field of Bitcoin decentralized finance (BTCFI). The report, titled Exploring the BTCFI Rabbit Hole from the Perspective of Bitcoin's Programmability, aims to help readers understand the BTCFI sector better, by exploring the evolutionary path of Bitcoin programming, delving into how Bitcoin programming can support various BTCFI applications, showcasing the current real-world BTCFI implementation scenarios, and explaining the underlying logic of BTCFI's future growth and adoption.

HTX Ventures has been contributing to BTCFI for a long time. As stated in its 2024 Half-Year Investment Report, BTCFI is highlighted as one of HTX Ventures' six key investment directions in 2024. Some of HTX Ventures' portfolio companies in the BTCFI sector include Babylon, BounceBit, COREx, and more.

The new report once again shows HTX Ventures' interest in BTCFI. It begins with the foundations of the Bitcoin contracts, which were laid fourteen years ago by Satoshi. Understanding the basics of Bitcoin programming involves several concepts, including Transaction Outputs (TXO), Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO), scriptSig, and Opcodes. "Bitcoin script programming is about programming money and enabling a specific amount of money to respond to particular input data. By designing the scriptPubKey, opcodes, and the interaction process between users, we can offer cryptographic guarantees for the key state transitions of Bitcoin contracts, ensuring the contracts' proper execution," the report points out.

There are some mechanisms to be used to enable the implementation of different types of transactions, including MultiSig, Timelocks, Hashlocks, Flow Control, and SIGHASH. The report explains, "the basic model of Bitcoin programming is where UTXO locking scripts specify verification conditions, unlocking scripts provide data, and opcodes in locking scripts indicate the verification program. The funds can be spent once the verification program is passed."

There are some core limitations, however, such as only a few verification programs being available, Bitcoin scripts having no computational power, and UTXO unlocking conditions being completely independent.

Unlike the computation-based Ethereum contracts, Bitcoin contracts are verification-based, which has brought many challenges in developing BTCFI products. Despite the difficulties,  "over the ten years of developing Bitcoin contracts, the ingenious use of cryptographic algorithms and signatures has significantly enhanced privacy, efficiency, and decentralization, making BTCFI products possible," the report states, and starts introducing Bitcoin programming milestones. Innovative tools, such as the Discreet Log Contract (DLC), Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions (PSBT), and MuSig2 bring new solutions to the problems in Bitcoin programming, driving the development of BTCFI.

The Taproot upgrade activated in November 2021 was revolutionary for the Bitcoin ecosystem, allowing Bitcoin to hold in custody large-scale smart contracts with tens of thousands of signatories while concealing all participants and maintaining the size of a single-signature transaction. This makes more complex on-chain BTCFI operations possible and significantly improves privacy and transaction efficiency.

Such technological innovations pave the way for BTCFI's further development. Then in January 2023, Ordinals were proposed, which aimed to assign each sat a unique identifier and attribute, so as to transform it into a unique NFT. The creation and trading of Bitcoin NFTs were realized, not only expanding the uses of Bitcoin but also allowing users to directly create and trade digital assets on the Bitcoin blockchain. This led to the introduction of BRC-20, a token system for on-chain recording and off-chain processing that uses JSON data's ordinal inscriptions to deploy token contracts, mint tokens, and transfer them.

The naissance of Ordinals and BRC-20 created trading demand and blue-chip assets for BTCFI. More importantly, they offered many BTCFI projects new ideas based on indexer programming that enhanced Bitcoin's contract capabilities.

Bitcoin's programmability has come a long way and made great progress, forming a thriving BTCFI ecosystem with more and more application scenarios of BTCFI arising. The report lastly lists some notable BTCFI implementations, including BTC staking provider Babylon, asset issuance platforms Unisat and Magic Eden, lending protocol Liquidium, BTCFI scaling solution Fractal Bitcoin, and more.

The emergence of BTCFI applications indicates that its market potential is becoming evident. With Bitcoin becoming more and more mainstream, the market demand for BTCFI use cases will also increase, fostering a new financial ecosystem centered around Bitcoin. "The formation of this ecosystem will propel Bitcoin further beyond the 'digital gold' narrative, establishing it as an indispensable decentralized financial infrastructure in the global economic system," the report concludes.

To read the full report, please visit: https://square.htx.com/htx-ventures-exploring-the-btcfi-rabbit-hole-from-the-perspective-of-bitcoins-programmability/

About HTX Ventures

HTX Ventures, the global investment division of HTX, integrates investment, incubation, and research to identify the best and brightest teams worldwide. With more than a decade-long history as an industry pioneer, HTX Ventures excels at identifying cutting-edge technologies and emerging business models within the sector. To foster growth within the blockchain ecosystem, we provide comprehensive support to projects, including financing, resources, and strategic advice.

HTX Ventures currently backs over 300 projects spanning multiple blockchain sectors, with select high-quality initiatives already trading on the HTX exchange. Furthermore, as one of the most active FOF (Fund of Funds) funds, HTX Ventures invests in 30 top global funds and collaborates with leading blockchain funds such as Polychain, Dragonfly, Bankless, Gitcoin, Figment, Nomad, Animoca, and Hack VC to jointly build a blockchain ecosystem. Visit us here.

Feel free to contact us for investment and collaboration at VC@htx-inc.com

** The press release content is from PR Newswire. Bastille Post is not involved in its creation. **

HTX Ventures: Bitcoin Scripting Advances Unlock Potential for Secure and Scalable BTCFI