Proof of origin, proof of process.
Open Food Chain builds product passports for the food industry: scan a code on a bar of chocolate or a bottle of olive oil and see where it came from, batch by batch, with the evidence behind every claim. With two European regulations about to make that kind of proof mandatory, their roadmap needed to move faster than any team could hire against.
This case is about how they did it: agentic development on the Runbaze platform, beyond the chat interface. Fast, guardrailed, and systematised, with a record their biggest clients can inspect.
About Open Food Chain
Their platform turns traceability data, certificates, and supplier evidence into a scannable product passport, for the categories where origin decides the purchase: cacao, olive oil, fish, juice, tea. Their users are food brands whose buyers include some of the biggest names in the industry, and whose claims are examined by regulators and consumers at once.
None of this is trivial engineering. A passport platform sits at the intersection of messy inputs and unforgiving outputs. Evidence arrives from many suppliers in as many formats: certificates, audit reports, origin declarations, geolocation data. It has to be verified, structured, and bound to the right product at the right batch. The output end is consumer-scale: a QR code on a supermarket shelf, resolving on the GS1 Digital Link standard for whichever batch is in the shopper's hand, with analytics behind every scan and enterprise clients who want it connected to their own systems. The roadmap that serves all of that is never short.
The regulatory clock
Two dates turned that roadmap urgent. From 27 September 2026, the EU's Empowering Consumers Directive bans generic environmental claims: "natural", "eco", "climate neutral" are no longer allowed on a label without recognised proof behind them. And from 30 December 2026, the EU Deforestation Regulation requires large companies placing cocoa, coffee, soy and other listed commodities on the European market to prove, with geolocation data down to the plot of land, that their supply chains are deforestation-free.
For Open Food Chain's clients, product evidence is turning from marketing into law, on a countdown measured in weeks. For Open Food Chain, it means every feature on the roadmap is wanted now.
Beyond the chat interface
Open Food Chain had already done what sharp teams do: they adopted AI-assisted development early, and the speed was real. They also saw its ceiling before it hurt them. A chat window helps one developer, once. It starts from zero every session, keeps the team's standards in whoever happens to be typing, and leaves nothing behind that a reviewer, let alone an enterprise client, can inspect. Speed that lives in browser tabs cannot be scheduled, parallelised, or answered for. That is fine for individuals. It is not an operating model for a company whose entire product is verifiable evidence.
So they onboarded onto Pulse and took agentic development beyond the chat interface. Their development now runs the way their supply chains do. Work enters as a specified brief, not a prompt in a tab. Agents build on a live board, chained by autopilot, inside safety rules and cost budgets. A person signs off at the gates where a wrong call would cost something. And every run, every approval, and every change lands in the record, from intent to deploy. The speed they had is still there. What changed is that it is now a system, and it leaves evidence.
How it runs
The setup itself is deliberately unexciting, which is the point. Pulse runs against their systems, and the model underneath stays their choice. Work enters as task briefs precise enough to survive literal execution. Autopilot chains the tasks: when one completes, the next in the dependency line starts on its own. Safety rules block destructive commands out of the box, with their own rules layered on top. Cost budgets warn or block before an agent spends what it should not. Evaluations score the agents against test suites, and the changelog writes itself from the git log.
What that unlocks is parallelism. A specified brief can be worked by an agent while the team holds judgment: more of the roadmap moves at once than they could ever staff, and nothing ships without a gate a person owned. When a large client, or a regulator behind that client, asks how a feature came to be, the answer is not a shrug toward an AI tool. It is a record: this brief, these runs, this review, this deploy.
Get started
There is a symmetry here we like. Open Food Chain spent years telling the food industry that a claim is worth what its evidence proves. Now their own engineering makes the same argument about software. A company that sells proof of origin builds with proof of process, and can put both in front of the most demanding client in the room.
This is what agentic development looks like when it is built for the enterprise rather than the demo: agents on the volume, people at the gates, and a record that answers. If your roadmap is bigger than your team, the sequence starts small and proves itself first.