The problem
A single food-safety failure can destroy a brand — yet compliance data lives in scattered spreadsheets and paper audits across farmers, manufacturers, and certifiers. Founder Abedalrhman Habashneh, himself an ex-food manufacturer, kept hitting the same wall: no consistent way to share safety data, with regional exports routinely denied entry to global markets on safety grounds.
How it works
Decapolis offers blockchain-based compliance-as-a-service. Its Decapolis Food Guard product digitises producer record-keeping — hooking into measurement systems, IoT devices, and ERPs — and writes stage-by-stage assessments into a tamper-evident chain of records, surfaced to shoppers and auditors through QR codes. A 2020 pilot with the World Food Programme trained farmers in safety standards and market access.
Pain points
Fragmented safety data across stakeholders, export rejections, audit-heavy manual processes, and smallholders who cannot document quality well enough to reach premium markets.
Business model
Compliance-as-a-service: recurring subscriptions for traceability, audit collaboration, and certification workflows sold to retailers, agri-businesses, manufacturers, and public agencies — anchored by large enterprise deployments.
Challenges
Long food-industry procurement cycles mean pilots must be converted into paid, multi-segment rollouts; and with rival traceability platforms in the market, Decapolis has to make Food Guard a shared industry standard rather than a single-partner system.
Funding
- Raised: $250K (Jun 2021) from ISSF and Oasis500 for hiring and platform development, with Saudi expansion flagged.
- Strategic: Fresh Del Monte Produce took a 39% stake (Oct 2022, terms undisclosed) to roll Food Guard across all its business segments and offer the platform to other businesses.
Latest — Oct 2022
Fresh Del Monte Produce invested for a 39% stake in the Jordanian and UK-based startup and began rolling out Decapolis Food Guard across its operations — starting with pineapple production in Costa Rica — while Decapolis works with the World Food Programme to bring 600+ smallholder farmers into higher-quality, export-ready production.