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’.
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.
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 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.
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:
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:
"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.
Our Verified Hide Data approach is creating measurable results at every stage of leather manufacturing:
As one of our customers, Tasman Tanning, discovered, these benefits translate to concrete business results:
We've designed our system to integrate seamlessly with existing operations:
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:
Looking ahead, we see Verified Hide Data enabling an entirely new approach to leather trading—one that combines trust, efficiency, and precision:
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.
With Verified Hide Data, leather manufacturers can achieve what once seemed impossible:
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?"