As we presented at the recent APLF Leather Supply Chain Symposium 2025 in Hong Kong, we at Mindhive Global are revolutionizing the leather industry through our AI-powered grading technology. Our co-founder and CTO Dion Bettjeman shared our journey and the transformative impact of Verified Hide Data in his presentation ‘Trusted Data, Better Decisions: AI-Powered Grading for Global Tanneries’.
Introducing Verified Hide Data: A new standard for quality
At the heart of our approach is a simple yet powerful concept: Verified Hide Data.
We define Verified Hide Data as standardized, objective quality information about leather hides, generated through AI-powered machine vision inspection and maintained throughout the manufacturing process. This data creates a single source of truth about hide characteristics, defects, and grades that can be trusted by all parties in the supply chain.
Consider this practical example: A Brazilian tannery using our technology can now guarantee the quality of each pallet shipped to their European customers, eliminating the need for re-inspection and enabling precise fulfillment of specific grade requirements. This represents a fundamental shift in how quality is managed and trusted across borders.
Understanding the fragmented leather value chain
The leather industry has developed over centuries, but its traditional quality management approach hasn't kept pace with modern technological capabilities. The current value chain is highly fragmented:
- At the raw hide stage, basic animal data is collected but rarely connected to downstream quality outcomes
- During wet-blue processing, subjective manual grading creates inconsistencies
- At splitting, decisions about thickness and application are often made with incomplete quality information
- During crust leather production, quality issues that could have been identified earlier often emerge
- In finished leather manufacturing, defects require extensive rework or result in downgrades
At each stage, quality information is trapped in silos—inspections happen multiple times, but the data is rarely passed along. Manual inspections lead to lost insights, and individual hide-level data is not retained or leveraged for optimization.
Our grading technology breaks these silos, starting at the wet blue stage where we've been operating since 2014. We inspect hides at extremely high resolution, delivering a standardized grading process at speeds of up to 360 hides per hour. This provides customers with precise inventory tracking—every single hide is identified and tracked through the entire process.
Transforming hub-and-spoke operations
One of the most dramatic impacts of our technology is on large-scale operations with multiple production sites. For Brazilian tannery groups like JBS Couros operating with a hub-and-spoke model, Verified Hide Data is revolutionizing how material flows through the system.
Traditional distribution models follow a labor-intensive, inefficient pattern:
- Initial manual grading at satellite production sites
- Shipping to central distribution facilities
- Re-sorting and quality verification at the distribution center
- Customer inspection and potential claims
- Often another sort at the customer site
This approach creates enormous inefficiencies. Eliminating these redundant steps will create significant competitive advantages. With our system implemented across satellite tanneries, large wet-blue manufacturers will be able to:
- Grade all hides at the source using consistent, objective criteria
- Digitally track the exact composition of every pallet
- Eliminate costly re-sorting at distribution centers
- Fill containers with customer-specific hide specifications directly from satellite locations
- Provide digital quality reports that customers trust, eliminating disputes
"We know what's in the tanneries, what's on the trucks, and what's in the distribution centers," notes Dion. "You can have 3 million pieces of hides in your inventory, and if you want to look through that and say 'I have a customer who wants a specific SKU or grade profile,' we can instantly look at every piece of hide and say 'these are the ones that fit those criteria, these pallets are most effective for your application.'"
The implications for inventory management are profound. Instead of the traditional fear of getting stuck with lower grades if customers only want premium material, our customers can efficiently fulfill custom orders at premium prices while confidently placing other grades with appropriate markets—all without the traditional overhead and handling costs.
Real-world impact across the supply chain
Our Verified Hide Data approach is creating measurable results at every stage of leather manufacturing:
At wet-blue stage
- Precise pallet composition tracking provides complete visibility
- Data-driven inventory management across millions of hides
- Custom order fulfillment based on verified grades
- Enhanced material allocation to appropriate end-use cases
At splitting stage
- Informed, real-time choices with end use in mind
- Yield optimization through better splitting decisions
- Waste reduction through precise material routing
At crust stage
- Better raw material selection based on verified quality profiles
- Process improvements identified through data analysis
- Higher-quality outputs with fewer surprises
At finished stage
- Automated surface inspection against customer specifications
- Process defects separated from inherent hide characteristics
- Standardized quality assessment across multiple production sites
- Digital quality reports for transparent customer relationships
For end customers
- Trusted quality verification before cutting
- Detailed defect maps to optimize cutting yields
- Traceable quality data for their own quality management systems
- Reduced need for incoming quality inspection
As one of our customers, Tasman Tanning, discovered, these benefits translate to concrete business results:
- 50% reduction in downstream reject rates
- Optimized hide allocation across product lines
- Increased throughput without additional labor
- Better yield from premium-grade material
Implementing our technology
We've designed our system to integrate seamlessly with existing operations:
- Our equipment fits behind existing sammying machines
- Installation requires about an evening of downtime
- There's no modification to production lines
- We operate at full line speed (up to 360 hides per hour or faster if required)
- The data we generate connects directly with ERP and inventory systems
For those implementing traceability systems, we also integrate with laser marking technologies to create a permanent link between physical hides and their verified data. This enables:
- Complete traceability from wet-blue through to finished leather
- Automatic pallet composition tracking
- Verified chain of custody
- Integration with compliance documentation
The future of leather trading
Looking ahead, we see Verified Hide Data enabling an entirely new approach to leather trading—one that combines trust, efficiency, and precision:
- Data-driven quality management
- Evolution from isolated assessments to continuous quality intelligence
- Predictive analytics connecting raw material quality to finished leather performance
- Seamless integration with traceability and compliance requirements
- New trading models
- Value-based pricing for pre-graded, verified materials
- Dynamic order fulfillment with customer-specific grade recipes
- Elimination of redundant quality checks throughout the chain
- Direct distribution models that weren't possible with fragmented systems
- Supply chain evolution
- Resource optimization through precise quality matching
- New collaboration models between producers and customers
- Sustainability improvements through reduced waste and transportation
- Industry-wide standardization of quality assessment
These changes are happening against a backdrop of increasing demands—EU deforestation regulations requiring complete traceability, automotive customers requiring detailed quality documentation, and growing pressure for sustainable and efficient processing.
Join the transformation
With Verified Hide Data, leather manufacturers can achieve what once seemed impossible:
- Eliminating quality disputes with their customers
- Shipping entire containers directly to customer sites without additional inspection
- Cutting reject rates in half without adding burden to their processes
The leather industry's future belongs to those who embrace Verified Hide Data—not just to make better decisions today, but to define the standards for quality, efficiency, and transparency that will shape leather trading for decades to come.
As Dion shared at the Symposium, "This is not just an operational improvement. It's a transformation. And it's already happening. The question is: Are you ready to be part of it?"