Q-Codes and Cold Cuts: The Argentine Technologist Reinventing Meat Traceability

By: Damaris Luna
BUENOS AIRES - 10July,2025 - Argentina is known as the meat capital of the world. Now its paving the way for cutting edge meat production employing AI and blockchain technology. Leading this effort is HernanSantestevan, a thirtysevenyearold tech entrepreneur from Rosario, one of the principal architects of Latin America's fastmoving foodtechnology renaissance.

Over the past three years Santestevan has overseen a series of digital projects that industry analysts say are resetting performance benchmarks for the region's meat processors and retailers. At PaladiniS.A., the centuryold pork and coldcuts producer, he directed the rollout of a SAP S/4based meatindustry suite that links livestock procurement, slaughter, processing and national distribution in real time. By replacing spreadsheets and standalone billing programs with a single ledger, the system reduced productiontoshelf cycle time by more than a quarter and cut stockreconciliation errors to what company executives call "negligible levels."

Yet it is Santestevan's work beyond enterprise resource planning that has drawn notice from competitors and regulators alike. Under his guidance a group of meat producers launched Argentina's first blockchainenabled producttraceability programme for fresh pork. Each package now carries a QR code that, when scanned, presents consumers with an immutable record of the animal's origin, the temperatures maintained during transport and the results of veterinary inspections. According to figures supplied by the group, the transparency initiative has trimmed recall times by 40% and contributed to a fivepoint rise in brandtrust scores recorded by independent survey group Consumidores Argentinos.

Santestevan applied the same datacentred approach to demand forecasting. Drawing on two years of cleaned pointofsale data, he trained gradientboosting and recurrentneuralnetwork models capable of predicting daylevel demand for 200 highvolume stockkeeping units. After one full season in production the models have lowered forecast error from 33% to 14% and freed roughly US$8million in working capital, according to an internal presentation made public by the group.

The algorithmic forecasts also feed an InternetofThings coldchain platform that Santestevan helped specify; refrigerated trailers equipped with SIMbased sensors relay temperature readings every two minutes, allowing logistics teams to trigger route changes or precool receiving docks.

The results have changed the meat packing sector. Paladini as well as Cordobabased firm Manfrey and Chile's Productos Fernandez have approached Santestevan for advisory engagements, according to people familiar with the matter. In April he delivered the keynote address at the Latin American Meat Institute's annual congress, outlining a phased investment model that pairs blockchain pilots with artificialintelligence demand planning. "The technology itself is the easy part," he told delegates. "The bottleneck is data governance and, quite frankly, executive courage."

Olivia Duarte, a senior analyst at marketresearch firm Bricklane Insights, saysSantestevan's projects have created a playbook other protein processors are now following.

"Latin America's meat supply chain has historically lagged Europe and North America in traceability and predictive analytics," MsDuarte said in an interview. "What Santestevan has done is provide hard numbers that justify the spend. That derisks the conversation for everyone else."

Government regulators have taken note as well. Argentina's National Service for AgriFood Health and Quality (Senasa) is evaluating whether blockchain audit trails like Paladini's should become a formal requirement for exporters. A spokesperson declined to comment on internal deliberations but acknowledged that pilots "show promising reductions in investigation times."

In the meantime while smartphonesavvy shoppers who tap a QR tag on a pack of ham may never spot his name, boardrooms from Rosario to Bogota know HernanSantestevan's methods by heart-an unmistakable sign that the era of opaque supply chains and handwritten ledgers is drawing to a close

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