Traceability & provenance
OnlyTons keeps provenance intact through a deal. Traceability answers the buyer's question — where did this actually come from, and what happened to it?
Traceability links
A traceability link records one step in a product's journey. Each link has:
- a step type: Origin, Grower, Harvest, Processing, Packaging, or Transport;
- a sequence number (so steps order correctly into a chain);
- the actor organization, a location and optional geo point, a date, and free-form detail.
Links attach either to a supply entry (the source's own chain) or to a deal line (steps that happen as part of fulfilling the deal — e.g. packaging and transport). A single link belongs to one or the other, never both.
Building a chain
Steps chain in sequence to tell the whole story, for example:
Origin (Puglia farm) ─▶ Grower ─▶ Harvest (Sept) ─▶ Processing (mill) ─▶ Packaging ─▶ Transport
The broker, or the organization that owns the supply, maintains these links.
Provenance on a deal
On a deal, OnlyTons assembles the links into a provenance view per line — for each supply allocation, the ordered chain from origin through to transport. The buyer sees this in the deal room alongside the shared timeline, so the story that comes with the goods is visible and ordered, not scattered.
Because provenance is built per line, an aggregated deal (several suppliers) shows each supplier's chain distinctly — you can see exactly which portion came from which origin.
What a party sees, and what it doesn't
The chain tells you what happened, not who did it. Each line is headed by the supplier's per-deal alias ("Supplier A"); each step shows its type and date. A step performed by a party to your deal carries their alias, and anyone else in the chain is shown by role ("Grower", "Certified processor").
Specific locations are not shown to a counterparty — naming the press or the mill usually names the grower to anyone who knows the district. What you get in their place is the area, and it widens automatically when too few operators work in one: a step attributed to a region with two producers in it points at those two producers.
Each step also carries how far OnlyTons went to check it —
| State | Means |
|---|---|
| Self-declared | The operator entered it; OnlyTons has not checked it. |
| Portal verified | OnlyTons checked it against something outside the platform. |
| Document backed | There is a document on file supporting it. |
— and the number of documents held. This is what makes "the portal audited them" a claim you can inspect step by step rather than take whole.
The broker keeps the full detail, including exact locations and geo points, for audits and regulatory exports (EU deforestation reporting wants plot geolocation; an organic audit wants the operator chain). Those exports are broker-only and every one of them is logged. See Operator privacy.
Why it's line-level
Traceability is attached at the level of individual supply and deal lines rather than the whole deal so that:
- aggregation keeps origins separate and honest (no blending of provenance);
- a supplier's own chain travels with its supply into any deal;
- packaging/transport steps that only exist because of a specific deal attach to that deal's line, not to the source.
Under the hood: links carry an optional geo point — a hook for future regulatory needs (e.g. EUDR deforestation-free geolocation) without changing the model.
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