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

July 10, 2025 at 18:36 PM EDT

Hernán Santestevan during a recent presentation to meat packing sector executives.

By: Damaris Luna

BUENOS AIRES - 10 July, 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 Hernán Santestevan, a thirty‑seven‑year‑old tech entrepreneur from Rosario, one of the principal architects of Latin America’s fast‑moving food‑technology 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 Paladini S.A., the century‑old pork and cold‑cuts producer, he directed the rollout of a SAP S/4‑based meat‑industry suite that links livestock procurement, slaughter, processing and national distribution in real time. By replacing spreadsheets and stand‑alone billing programs with a single ledger, the system reduced production‑to‑shelf cycle time by more than a quarter and cut stock‑reconciliation 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 blockchain‑enabled product‑traceability 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 five‑point rise in brand‑trust scores recorded by independent survey group Consumidores Argentinos.

Santestevan applied the same data‑centred approach to demand forecasting. Drawing on two years of cleaned point‑of‑sale data, he trained gradient‑boosting and recurrent‑neural‑network models capable of predicting day‑level demand for 200 high‑volume stock‑keeping units. After one full season in production the models have lowered forecast error from 33% to 14% and freed roughly US$8 million in working capital, according to an internal presentation made public by the group.

The algorithmic forecasts also feed an Internet‑of‑Things cold‑chain platform that Santestevan helped specify; refrigerated trailers equipped with SIM‑based sensors relay temperature readings every two minutes, allowing logistics teams to trigger route changes or pre‑cool receiving docks.

The results have changed the meat packing sector. Paladini as well as Córdoba‑based firm Manfrey and Chile’s Productos Fernández 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 artificial‑intelligence 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 market‑research firm Bricklane Insights, says Santestevan’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,” Ms Duarte said in an interview. “What Santestevan has done is provide hard numbers that justify the spend. That de‑risks the conversation for everyone else.”

Government regulators have taken note as well. Argentina’s National Service for Agri‑Food 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 smartphone‑savvy shoppers who tap a QR tag on a pack of ham may never spot his name, boardrooms from Rosario to Bogotá know Hernán Santestevan’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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Q-Codes and Cold Cuts: The Argentine Technologist Reinventing Meat Traceability

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