When a plant disease is detected somewhere in the supply chain, tracing its origin can quickly turn into a complex investigation. The Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (Nederlandse Voedsel- en Warenautoriteit, NVWA) needs to determine which batches are affected, where they have gone and where the infection/infestation originated. However this has proven to be an enormous challenge, as information about a plant does not necessarily remain connected throughout its journey. When plants change hands, part of that history can become hard to trace.
A Digital Product Passport (DPP) could change this. Commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Food Security and Nature (LVVN) and carried out in collaboration with NVWA, TNO explored how DPPs could create value within the agricultural domain, using a digitalised plant passport as their first concrete DPP use case. Their proof of concept shows how plants could become digitally traceable through the entire supply chain. So if the technology works, the next question becomes: what is needed to make all relevant parties involved in the supply chain actually use it?
Why plant information gets lost along the supply chain
Plants that are traded already have a plant passport containing information about the plant. In practice, this passport is generally physical, for example in the form of a label. When plants move to another grower and are subsequently sold onwards, a new passport may be issued. The link to the previous grower then disappears.
That becomes particularly problematic when a disease is discovered. Laura van den Aarssen, Senior Consultant at TNO Vector and lead consultant on this project, explains what this means for supervision. “The NVWA must then determine which batches are contaminated, where they are located, who is responsible and where they originated. When a batch moves to another grower and is then sold onwards, a new passport is created and the connection between previous passports essentially disappears. This causes a lot of manual work in investigations.”
The NVWA has to trace the supply chain backwards, gathering information from each individual party. The question behind the proof of concept was whether digitalisation could preserve those connections. “Can we map that entire chain, the journey of the plant from the seed until it eventually reaches the consumer’s garden?” Laura says. ‘We spoke to NVWA and other stakeholders, and they expect that having this information readily available digitally could save a lot of time when tracing an outbreak. There’s clear enthusiasm for the idea, and a next step would be to test this in practice.”
Better traceability could also benefit growers and traders, as they currently need to retrieve a large amount of information when authorities investigate an outbreak. “Faster identification of affected batches could, in theory, also help limit the amount of material that ultimately needs to be destroyed. ‘That’s something we’d like to test in practice,’ Laura adds.” “According to information shared by the NVWA, depending on the outbreak and the greenhouse involved, losses can in some cases run into millions, Laura explains.”
From a physical passport to a traceable chain
To explore the concept, TNO developed a proof of concept based on a simplified supply chain. The plant passport provided a useful starting point precisely because a passport already exists. Leon Visscher, scientist and software architect within TNO’s Data Ecosystems department, explains: “The plant passport was a good first use case for introducing DPP techniques, because the existing passport is conceptually already very close to a DPP. It is a mandatory set of information that travels with the product, it just exists on paper. So we asked: what happens if we create a digital version, and what does that add?”
Simply digitising the information of the existing plant passport is not enough. The data also needs to be findable, understandable and trustworthy. “We created a digital version of the current plant passport, with structured identifiers and an unambiguous way to access the data via its ID”, Leon explains. “The DPP also includes a schema describing what the data means, as well as digital signatures to increase its reliability. Each passport contains a reference to the previous passport. That is actually the step that immediately creates the most value for a supervisory authority.”
Those references make it possible to follow the chain backwards. Instead of contacting each organisation separately to establish where a batch came from, an inspector could retrieve the previous passport from the current one. That becomes especially relevant when batches are split. A batch of plants can be divided into several smaller batches, which may subsequently be divided again. What initially appears to be a linear chain can quickly turn into a branching tree. Maintaining the relationships digitally makes that history easier to reconstruct.
But supervision alone is not enough to create widespread adoption. In this use case, there is no DPP obligation yet forcing every party in the chain to participate. Growers, traders and other organisations therefore need to see value for themselves as well. Sander Jacobs, who works in the digital team within LVVN’s Strategy, Knowledge and Innovation Directorate, sees widespread participation as an important condition for adoption. “This is clearly a use case that can create value for supervision. But it can also create value beyond that, including for producers. It is important to do both at the same time. It shouldn’t become something that is only imposed on different parties. We need to demonstrate what the value is for them.”
Once data is available, it could potentially support other applications too. A producer operating more sustainably, for example, could use the information to demonstrate how a product was produced. “Once you collect data for one purpose, you can also use it for another,” Sander says. “And once this starts to gain momentum, it can accelerate itself because people will increasingly see new applications. You need to create that positive association and get people enthusiastic about it. That also creates opportunities and earning potential. So it is important to involve parties from the beginning, including in the ownership of the data, and give them the opportunity to benefit from it.”
A DPP is not one central system
The word ‘passport’ can easily suggest that all information about a product will eventually end up in one central digital document or platform. According to Leon, that is not how a DPP should be understood. “A DPP is not one piece of software or one system that everyone has to use. It is a set of standards and protocols that describe how you express your data, how you share a schema so that other parties know what the data means, and how identifiers are defined. Any system can implement those standards, and as long as different parties do so, their systems can work together.”
That means the data does not have to end up in one place. Each organisation can keep its passports in its own system, or leave that to a service provider. A smaller company with limited technical resources could use such a provider, while a highly digitalised organisation could implement the same standards directly in its own systems. “So whether a DPP comes from a SME (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises) or from a large multinational, you should be able to retrieve and read it in the same way,” Leon says. “There are many ways to implement it. What matters are the standards and the agreements about what a DPP is, not one particular solution.” The prototype from this project is also included in the TNO DPP Playground, an interactive environment for experimenting with these DPP techniques.
The importance of common agreements extends beyond individual organisations. For Sander, the international dimension is particularly relevant because many supply chains cross borders. Even seemingly straightforward concepts are not always defined in exactly the same way. “Every country has its own systems, and they don’t all fit together automatically,” Sander says. “There are differences even in something like the registration of farms. Ultimately, it comes down to the agreements we make with each other: what information do we share, how do we share it and what agreements do we make about that?” For a sector in which products and data move across borders, interoperability therefore involves more than getting two technical systems to communicate. The parties involved also need a shared understanding of the information being exchanged.
Trust is another important element. The proof of concept uses digitally signed data, making it possible to verify where information originated and whether it has been changed after the digital passport was issued. Leon compares this with online banking. When someone logs into a familiar banking environment, they trust the bank and the connection. But if information from that environment is subsequently sent to another person as a PDF, that recipient has to trust that the sender has not altered or fabricated the information. “With this approach, the trust is really embedded in the data through digital signatures,” he says. “You don’t necessarily have to trust the system or the connection with one particular party. Even if that data has been passed on four or five times, you can still verify where it originated and whether it has been altered since it was issued.”
This distributed approach is particularly relevant in a supply chain where organisations have their own systems and commercial interests. Not every participant necessarily wants to disclose every piece of information to every other participant. A functioning DPP ecosystem therefore requires not only technical interoperability, but agreements about who can access which information and under what conditions.
The biggest challenge is not technical
This is where the exploration moves beyond technology. Who manages the infrastructure? Who is allowed to use particular data? How are costs and benefits distributed? And which organisations are trusted to fulfil particular roles? “You need use cases that create value and generate new insights,” Laura explains. “If people don’t see what the potential benefit could be, they won’t want to take the risk of investing time and money. Otherwise, people will think: nice that we can share data, but what’s in it for me? And you also need to make agreements. Governance is a fundamental part of DPPs and of data sharing in larger sectors and ecosystems. How do you distribute the costs? Who manages the data and the infrastructure?”
For Laura, these questions are ultimately inseparable from adoption. “People often focus only on the technology, while the biggest challenges, in my experience, are about how we make agreements with each other and ensure that everyone benefits financially, or at least doesn’t lose out. Otherwise it won’t work.” Sander agrees: “I’d say that the challenges are 90% social, ethical and legal, and perhaps 10% technical. You have to talk to the parties in the chain: who do they trust in this? One party may be perfectly comfortable with the government taking the lead, while another may not be. You really need to have that conversation before you can make the technical decisions.”
Additionally, developing a prototype in a controlled environment is different from embedding it in organisations’ daily processes. “As engineers, we know exactly how everything works, down to the ones and zeros,” he says. “Then it can seem obvious that the proposed technical solution is the way to go. But that is often a pitfall: you think, this works, so people will simply start using it. To actually use a system in the real world, many more things are involved than just software doing what it is supposed to do.”
That makes it important not to design an ecosystem solely around digitally advanced frontrunners. Sander argues that the perspectives of organisations that may adopt a DPP much later should be considered from the beginning. “We shouldn’t only look at what can quickly be achieved with a few parties, but also involve those who might be the last to start using it,” he says. “What would this mean for you? What are your challenges? And by moving early as the Netherlands, we can also make sure that our interests are represented. But that has to happen through European cooperation.”
At the same time, the LVVN domain can learn from sectors that are already further ahead with DPPs, such as batteries and textiles. Laura sees value in starting early enough to learn, while avoiding solutions that develop too far away from European standards and other initiatives. The aim is not to build an isolated agricultural DPP infrastructure, but to connect practical experimentation with broader developments.
From proof of concept to practice
In September 2026, it was confirmed that practical experimentation will now continue. Following the initial exploration, TNO and LVVN are moving into a follow-up project expected to run for approximately three years. The plant passport will remain one of the central use cases. While the first proof of concept was developed primarily with the NVWA, the next phase will bring growers, traders and other market participants into the process to further develop and test the concept in practice. “We have focused very specifically on one proof of concept, and we definitely want to take that further,” Laura says. “We now want to see whether we can develop and test it together with market parties.”
At the same time, other use cases within the LVVN domain will be explored. Rather than committing to every idea for the full three years, the project will periodically assess which applications show enough potential to continue. Leon expects that moving closer to actual implementation will expose questions that a technical prototype cannot answer. “We need to sit down with market parties and supervisory authorities and ask: what stands between where we are now and you actually using this? If you start walking through that process step by step, you very quickly encounter questions such as: do we need to do this differently, and does this actually fit with how we currently work?”
For TNO and LVVN the aim is to identify applications that create enough value for organisations to eventually continue without the project being the driving force. “Ultimately, the goal is for the market to take over,” Laura says. “Hopefully something will really take off in practice. But ultimately, that isn’t up to us.” The digital plant passport is therefore not an endpoint, but a concrete test of a much broader idea: whether information that currently becomes fragmented across a chain can remain findable, understandable and trustworthy without forcing every organisation into one central system. The coming phase will show whether that technical possibility can also become a shared proposition, one in which the parties supplying and using the data see enough value to keep participating.
Do you want to learn more about how DPPs could create value within the agricultural domain? Read TNO’s paper, Digital Product Passports in the LVVN Domain: A Vision for Traceability, Data Sharing and Ecosystem Development.
