Nine Rivers Anti-counterfeit Solution

Product authentication and customer engagement tool for China's new Whisky brand...

Industry
Retail

Web Address
www.nineriversdistillery.com

Background

As Nine Rivers Distillery prepares to launch their whisky brand in China, they asked Eggplant Digital to work on an anti-counterfeit solution that would protect their brand reputation and ensure customers know they are purchasing an original product.

Solution

One unfortunate element of bringing a product to China is to ensure that your original product is the one that lands in your customers hands. This ongoing fight against product counterfeiters, requires brands to use technology to track, and manage their inventory.

Eggplant Digital worked with Nine Rivers to develop a platform that uses a small NFC (Near Field Communication) chip secured to the whisky bottle. The NFC chip holds a unique ID linked to the encrypted custody chain for the products lifecycle, from bottling to distribution to the final sale over the counter or online.

By encrypting each step of the custody chain to blockchain, an unbreakable ledger is created to inform the customer of where the product has been and thus its authenticity.

On the end customer side, we created Android and iOS apps that are used to scan the Nine River NFC chips, to bring up all the details of the product lifecycle, giving an assurance the product is genuine.

Results

Through initial testing of the solution, we discovered that, due to lack of awareness of the threat of fake alcohol and visually seeing the NFC chip on the product, meant that in most cases the customer would not scan the NFC chip with their phone.

Therefore we worked with the client to create a coupon system that rewarded customers with points each time they opened and scanned a product. The points accumulated and could be converted to a coupon code to use on a number of alcohol online stores run by Nine Rivers management team.

With a two part system of product authentication and customer rewards, the engagement with the app increased by multiple factors and a successful pilot has now been undertaken, with preparation to launch in full in 2022.