Do you know where your handbag or tuna comes from?

Every product tells a story. And knowing more about where products come from is vital to brands and retailers – and being aware if there slavery or huge environmental damage in their supply chain is integral.

Jessi Baker is the woman behind Provenance, a software company that uses novel technologies like the blockchain (a word that people throw around, but nobody understands) to help businesses share information about the people, places and materials involved in their products. It’s all about revolutionising trust: “If radical transparency becomes the norm, particularly in supply chains for businesses, then we will be really moving towards a fantastic new phase for sustainability, which I’m personally very excited about.”

Provenance enables every product to come with an open, secure record of its journey and creation. “Blockchain is getting a lot of hype around it, but essentially what it is is a fancy database,” Jessi told us. “What is super-cool about it is that you can communicate information peer to peer and know that you can trust it, unlike today through the internet where you need a third party in order to broker all of our information.”

Watch ► Jessi tells us what will “save the day”.

Video produced by Atlas of the Future for Project Breakthrough (United Nations Global Compact/ Volans). Check out our other breakthrough videos here.