Ubloquity appoints former Asda VP John Buxton as commercial director

The UK’s foremost digital chain of provenance expert ubloquity has announced the appointment of John Buxton as its commercial director.

John previously spent two years at legal tech consultancy SYKE – where he was VP Business Development and helped the company scale its business and double in size.

An award-winning Banbridge based start-up, ubloquity specialises in reducing food fraud, tackling food waste and removing inefficiencies within food value supply chains.

It does this by utilising blockchain technology, digital asset identification and validation. Its aim is to revolutionise how food is produced, manufactured, shipped and distributed, providing transparency and visibility from farm to fork.

Rob Chester, ubloquity’s CEO said: “We’re building a world-class team who will help take the company to the next level. Securing John’s services is a real coup. He has an amazing track-record at blue chip companies like GE Capital where he was head of operations in their Global Finance division, he ran factories for Heinz, Coca-Cola, and Nestle. And at Asda he headed up the transport and network strategy team before becoming Vice President for Store Proposition.”

John joins the ubloquity senior leadership team with immediate effect, working alongside colleagues who are based across the UK and Europe.

Kieran Kelly, ubloquity’s co-founder and CTO added: “Although our roots are here in Northern Ireland, we are already an international operation. Our IT board director Alin is based in Romania and manages a team of engineers there and in the Czech Republic. John will be situated in Yorkshire, England alongside our CEO Rob. However, with his support, we intend to open a presence in the coming weeks in the Republic of Ireland to help drive forward our frictionless border businesses.”

ubloquity was founded in July 2021, following a successful round of seed funding where it secured more than £2m from early investors. It currently employs 12 people and has a projected strong year one revenue.

John said: “It’s great to be part of such an exciting blockchain-enabled company. It has high growth potential, and products with multiple use cases and applications. My role is to maximise that potential, while applying the rigour you’d expect at a more established company. We’ll continue to have the agility of a start-up but we’ll adopt the mindset of a market-leader.”

ubloquity was initially established as a food provenance platform, enabling its customers to trace their products back to the most relevant start point in the supply chain. It has since diversified, serving multiple sectors across the value chain from logistics providers to livestock producers, retailers to regulators, pharmaceutical firms to food and beverage companies. Its platform was built on blockchain to enable NI farmers to create a digital twin for each of their cattle that they could register at birth, then track its entire lifecycle.

Kieran added: “We smart-tagged individual beef animals with a DNA/RFID tags linked to the farmer along with a unique geofence created by ubloquity around the boundaries of the farm. This was a revolutionary piece of innovation in the digital identification of animals, attracting attention not only from forward-thinking farmers but also the industry at large.”

Following Brexit, ubloquity has developed other revenue streams utilising the ubloquity platform to meet specific market needs for manufacturers within NI to transport animal products in and out of the country in a frictionless way.