The supply chain of a box of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese is more complicated than you might think.

Its 20 1ngredients come from as far away as China, Switzerland and West Africa. Take one of them: the riboflavin (Vitamin B2). It hails from Hubei, China. Another? Whey. It comes from Illinois. The salt, on the other hand, from Silver Springs, N.Y.

How can you, the consumer, trace the origin of each of the ingredients building that blue box of mac n’ cheese? The answer is Sourcemap.org, an open-source, supply chain mapping website based out of the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge.

PRK tracked down Sourcemap co-creator Leonardo Bonanni to learn more about this fascinating, empowering ‘tool’ now at consumers’ fingertips.

He believes that tracing supply chains, like the example above, can help individuals or companies decide whether a product is a fit. “There’s actually rigorous measures to see if something is right for you,” Bonanni said. “What’s right for you might not be [sic] for your neighbor.”

According to Bonanni, there’s a lack of information available on where product components come from. Sourcemap is looking to fill that gap.

“We want our consumers to have the right to know, when they look at a product, where it comes from, what it’s made of and what the social and the environmental impact is,” Bonanni said.

“Now that there’s a system that’s free and open and relatively easy for all your suppliers to tell you, to share their information with you, there’s less and less of an excuse to keep the information [from you],” he added.

Here’s how it works. Users of Sourcemap input data on a product, namely the ingredients and where they originated. The site then generates an interactive, full-color map illustrating the supply chain. Such users include Bonanni and co-creator Matthew Hockenberry, plus a team of volunteer researchers and students from MIT and beyond (new volunteers are welcome to sign up on the website).

“Every time someone makes a Sourcemap on our website they get a little sticker that they can apply to a product,” Bonanni said.

What’s the “little sticker?” Because approximately four billion people will use the internet for the first time on a cell phone or other mobile device, the project uses Quick Response (QR) codes, a barcode system readable by them. These codes differ from UPC codes in that they’re part of an open database and can encode a variety of information, like text or a website.

“We want as many platforms as possible to be compatible with ours,” Bonanni remarked. In fact, he reiterated several times during the interview that Sourcemap is designed to be an open source, free website that relies on communication between individuals for success.

“We see that down the road you won’t just see a label on a product that says ‘green’ or ‘made in China’ because these are meaningless things,” Bonanni said. “You’ll see a Sourcemap QR code that’s going to tell the entire story of the product.”

The costly risks associated with sourcing make this information critical, according to Bonanni. During a food recall, for example, individuals and companies are often unaware of where contamination occurred in a supply chain. The time lost while tracing the supply chain could mean further contamination and a greater portion of the public exposed to that health risk.

In fact, about one third of the maps people make are of food, Bonanni said, food being unique because it is one area in which consumers will pay a premium to learn the source(s). Perhaps it isn’t surprising, then, that the first users of Sourcemap were local Boston food entrepreneurs. The very first user? Season to Taste Catering out of Cambridge.

“As people are made aware of what the supply chains are, it brings this awareness to the whole industry,” owner Robert Harris told PRK by phone. “It brings value.”

Harris said he first used Sourcemap because it was important for him to let his customers know where their food came from. “It was a natural progression for what I do.”

“Our approach,” he added, “is to encourage everyone to ask where did this apple come from, where did this meat come from?” To that end, Harris offers source maps free of charge to his customers. It takes him about 15 minutes to create one. Since he’s the one who does the ordering, he knows quickly where ingredients come from.

Leonardo Bonanni, on the other hand, created his first Source Map in 2006 when he was curious about the supply chain for making a computer. It was hand-drawn and took him three months. For food, in contrast, the local supply chain is often straightforward – talk to a farmer and you may get all the information you need to create a Source Map. On the contrary, mapping industrial products requires the creator to hypothesize sources.

“It’s kind of a guessing game,” Bonanni said. Often times, producers do not publish their suppliers, and it demands journalistic research to find them. The box of mac n’ cheese is a case in point: it took over a year to research.

The Sourcemap team’s next projects are to begin “water foot printing” and to create a fair trade application for mobile devices. “Water is interesting because it changes from place to place,” Bonanni said. “A gallon of water in Peru is worth a different amount from a gallon of water in California.”

The Fair Trade app, on the other hand, would be a way for the consumer and farmer to create a real time connection. A consumer, Bonanni claims, could scan a product using a QR code and then read an SMS message from the farmer involved with the product. The message could contain information on workers and working conditions, for example.

“It should be the law that when you buy something, you should know what you’re buying,” Bonanni said. “I don’t know why that was a radical idea. I think people are now realizing ‘actually, we should know.’ I should know if there is lead in my children’s toys. I should know if I’m supporting armed conflict in the Congo.”

From food to furniture, Sourcemap.org hopes to map it all.