From Digital Records to Verifiable Business Claims: Evidence Governance in Agri-Food Value Chains

Abstract Digital transformation makes operational records abundant, yet the existence of digital records does not establish that a consequential business claim can be independently reconstructed. This study develops evidence verifiability capability (EVC) as a claim-specific organizational capability through which process governance and evidence controls convert digital records into defensible business evidence. The framework is examined through a two-stage documentary multi-case design covering 12 agri-food companies: five process-oriented cases from Ukraine and seven external analytical replications based on official corporate reporting. Across the corpus, a process KPI or operational result is directly observable in 12/12 cases, a digital/process mechanism and traceability/control evidence in 9/12 cases each, and responsibility/auditability evidence in 7/12 cases. Sensitivity analysis that includes partial evidence raises the latter figure to 11/12, demonstrating that broad governance disclosure is more common than claim-level reconstruction. Reproducible operational calculations further show why outcome change and digital attribution must remain separate: Astarta’s milk production rose 35.5% between 2020 and 2025, Ovostar’s H1 processing share rose 9.7 percentage points between 2023 and 2024, and KSG Agro’s average daily gain rose 8.19%, yet only the last source explicitly identifies a non-digital cause – genetics – so digital attribution is rejected. The study contributes to a management-level mechanism linking evidence architecture to verification effort and to evidence-related information asymmetry and proposes an evidence-by-design approach for technology management, assurance and agri-food governance.