Global food giants Walmart, Nestlé and others have teamed up to develop a blockchain to improve the supply chain management of food products, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Other participants of the “Food Trust” initiative include Dole Food Co., Driscoll’s Inc., Golden State Foods, Kroger Co., McCormick and Co., McLane Co., Tyson Foods Inc. and Unilever NV. The technology is being built in collaboration with IBM.
The objective is to improve recalls, quick identification of the issue, and reducing the time consumers are at risk. Businesses, on the other hand, would benefit by avoiding losses arising from broad food recalls. The Food Trust group aims to establish new standards for the rest of the food industry.
“You’re capturing real-time data at every point, on every single food product,” says Frank Yiannas, vice president of food safety at Walmart, which leads the effort. “It’s the equivalent of FedEx tracking for food.”
The project, while still in development, stores data related to 1 million items in about 50 food categories, IBM said.
In late 2017, IBM, in collaboration with Walmart, JD.com, and Tsinghua University National Engineering Laboratory for E-Commerce Technologies, announced a Blockchain Food Safety Alliance in China.
