Collaboratory for Open Software and Systems in Ag and Food

Transforming
Food & Agriculture
through
Collective Impact
& Open Innovation

COSSAF is driving open, decentralized solutions that enhance interoperability,
increase market opportunities,
and accelerate mutual value creation across the global
food and agriculture supply chain.

The Opportunity

Agriculture and food systems face complex, interconnected challenges that no single organization can solve alone. Supply chain inefficiencies, data silos, and incompatible systems create friction that limits innovation and reduces value for everyone—from growers to retailers to consumers. While individual companies excel within their domains, the lack of interoperable platforms and shared data standards prevents the industry from accessing data needed to realize its full potential. Traditional approaches often prioritize proprietary solutions over collaborative frameworks, making it difficult to achieve the accessibility and coordination of systems needed to address global food security, sustainability, and resilience challenges effectively and at scale.

Our Collaborative Solution

The convergence of open technologies, collaborative innovation, and human-centered design creates an unprecedented opportunity to raise the tide for all stakeholders in agriculture and food systems. By building interoperable platforms that respect data sovereignty while enabling seamless collaboration, we can unlock exponential value across the entire ecosystem. When growers, technology providers, retailers, and communities work together on shared infrastructure—rather than competing on foundational systems—everyone benefits from reduced friction, enhanced transparency, and accelerated innovation. This collaborative approach enables individual organizations to focus on their unique strengths while contributing to collective solutions that address industry-wide challenges, creating sustainable competitive advantages through cooperation rather than isolation.

Our Lighthouse Projects

Real-World Innovation - Driving Industry Transformation

COSSAF manages a portfolio of projects. While COSSAF brings experience and best practices, we recognize the structure and cadence of each project must fit the needs and desires of its stakeholders. To that end, COSSAF designs each project to develop its own leadership teams and resourcing to meet its particular needs.

We internally categorize our portfolio of projects in three different stages of maturity– “sandbox”, “developing”, and “graduated”. A “sandbox” project is likely in the design phase, minimally resourced, and in the process of building a community of stakeholders who share a common challenge and would consider working together to solve it.

A “developing” project can range from one that just launched out of the “sandbox” stage to one with years of collaborative efforts underway. In this phase, a core community has agreed to engage to work together on at least one common challenge, established an organizational structure and shared measurement metrics, and has resources to support the initiative. A “graduated” project is one that is no longer an on-going COSSAF initiative, and the reasons for graduating a project can vary. Perhaps the community decided their challenge has been adequately solved or perhaps it decided the challenge is better suited outside of COSSAF. For instance, the 2026 goal one of our project’s community set for itself is to launch the initiative as its own non-profit organization.

All of our projects are not theoretical exercises—they are practical initiatives designed to make measurable impacts across the agriculture and food sectors. Each project demonstrates our collaborative methodology in action, bringing together industry leaders, technology innovators, and communities to solve critical challenges while building the open infrastructure that enables entire ecosystems to thrive. From revolutionizing supply chain transparency to creating new models for regenerative agriculture advancement, these initiatives offer a new innovation model well suited for food and agriculture challenges. Our aim is to prove that when stakeholders unite their actions around shared goals, challenges in food and agriculture can be solved with the speed and scale needed.

Scaling California's Regenerative Almond+ Practices (SCRAP+)

SCRAP+ aims to scale regenerative agriculture practices on California's roughly two million acres of tree nuts by fostering pre-competitive collective impact. Overseen by a Steering Committee of leaders from the tree nut industry, it was first launched in 2023 as SCRAP, Scaling California’s Regenerative Almond Practices. In 2024 participants agreed to broaden SCRAP from almonds to include all tree nuts, and the new moniker “SCRAP+” was born. In 2024 participants also decided to use “total regenerative acres” of tree nuts in production as a primary measurement metric.

SCRAP+ priorities were chosen by the community in early 2024 and remain unchanged:

Defining “Regenerative” for Almonds (or all tree nuts now)
Realizing Outcomes, Adhering to Principles & Optimizing Practices
Gathering and Sharing Data & Measurements
Partnering with Growers to Build Two-way Community Knowledge

For more information, email info@cossaf.org or visit the SCRAP+ website.

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Sharing Platform for Ag Data & Equipment (SPADE)

SPADE– Sharing Platform for Ag Data & Equipment– is a “sandbox” stage COSSAF initiative developing equitable, open-source digital solutions to unlock equipment sharing that can transform agricultural practices and enable greater rural agriculture and food entrepreneurialism. In 2024 a group met in Fresno, California to co-design an open-source sharing platform that would also include data-sharing for use, payment and program management.

For more information, please email info@cossaf.org.

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Supply Chain of the Future (SCOTF)

The Supply Chain of the Future project emerged from a gathering of fresh industry supply chain stakeholders at the end of 2024. In early 2025 the community of stakeholders decided to pursue four workstreams addressing critical supply chain inefficiencies through collaborative innovation:

Shelf-life Prediction: Reduce waste and optimize pricing with predictive models
Smart Data Escrow: Open source tools to share data with anyone without sharing with everyone
Dynamic Pricing & Incentives: To improve margins with better performance
Harmonized Standards: Ensure interoperability, reduce barriers and accelerate innovation

By the end of 2025 hundreds of people from nearly two dozen countries from six continents–and across the fresh produce ecosystem from growers to retailers– had participated in SCOTF, trials between partners had been launched, and standards for the digital supply chain had been co-developed and submitted for ratification.

For more information on the fast-moving and ever-changing Supply Chain of the Future initiative please visit the project’s website.

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Smart Asynchronous Data in Escrow (Sadie)

The Smart Asynchronous Data in Escrow (Sadie) Project represents a transformative opportunity to create the world's first shared ownership, public benefit, privacy-preserving supply chain attestation network. It enables the exchange of digital information between partners in a trusted manner that does not compromise the data sovereignty of the data owner.

The Sadie Project is governed by industry stakeholders and leverages the “Smart Data Escrow” platform built with open source technology called oblivious smart contracting developed at the Purdue University OATS Center. Smart Data Escrow enables secure, verifiable claims about products to be carried throughout digital global supply chains while maintaining data sovereignty and privacy in a structure not owned by any single vendor.

COSSAF is building out the ecosystem to support the open source technology’s adoption. Smart Data Escrow is going through standard-setting adoption and trials with partners in our Supply Chain of the Future project.

For more information please email info@cossaf.org

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ABOUT

About COSSAF

COSSAF is a fiscally-sponsored non-profit project of the VINE Institute of Woodland, CA. It was established in 2024.

COSSAF flips the traditional technology development model on its head. Instead of pushing new technologies into markets, we start by understanding the real needs of stakeholders. We then facilitate pre-competitive collaboration that connects these market needs with appropriate technological solutions for mutual benefit.

Our approach ensures that every initiative we undertake is grounded in real-world requirements and delivers meaningful outcomes and social impact. By focusing on pre-competitive facilitation, we create an environment where true innovation can flourish apart from the pressure of market competition, allowing us to build sustainable business models that genuinely benefit all stakeholders.

Our Vision, Our Team

COSSAF envisions a future where agricultural and food systems are transformed through the power of open, decentralized technologies. Unlike traditional approaches that concentrate value in the hands of a few, we're creating a system where communities are empowered and value is distributed equitably across the entire supply chain. This isn't just about implementing new technology – it's about fundamentally reimagining how value is created and shared in agriculture and food systems worldwide.

Our vision extends beyond simple digitization or incremental improvements. We're building a future where farmers, packers, shippers, and retailers can seamlessly collaborate while maintaining sovereignty over their data and fair compensation for their contributions. By focusing on outcomes and impact, we're ensuring that technology serves the real needs of communities rather than the other way around.