Source: Axios via axios.com
Blockchain technology which had first caught people’s attention when its cryptocurrency disrupted the financial service industry is now expanding to other areas like healthcare, telecommunication, and energy. People are now realizing the potential of blockchain technology to be used on a larger scale to solve issues relating to real-time data access, partners' privacy, traceability, and auditability. One such area that will tremendously benefit from these functions is the supply chain ecosystem.
Handling today’s supply chain, which spans across several stages, locations, individuals and entities can extend over months of time. As a result of this complexity and lack of transparency, leading businesses all around are now interested in how blockchain can now transform their supply chain processes. Walmart is one such example.
Over the past year, Walmart has worked closely with IBM to combat food safety issues using blockchain technology and has announced for all its suppliers to upload their data to the blockchain by September 2019. This reduces the time required to trace a certain product from Walmart retail stores to its source in seconds as compared to manual processes that are used by several other grocery chains.
This initiative was taken after the tedious process of recalling contaminated romaine lettuce sold in Walmart and several other retail stores in the U.S, which ultimately affected more than 200 people. By quickly tracing leafy greens back to source during an outbreak using recent advances in blockchain technologies, impacts to human health can be minimized, health officials can conduct rapid and thorough root cause, and the implication and associated-losses of unaffected products that are inaccurately linked to an outbreak can be avoided.
The demand for fresher food is more than a passing fad. Fresh food purchases made up a third of all supermarket purchases in 2017. Yet Walmart realized that, even as consumers, distributors, and retailers, alike, heighten their scrutiny for freshness from harvest to shelf, $7 billion worth of fresh food still gets spoiled before ever reaching a consumer. On average, American meals travel 1,500 miles from farm to fork. This can contribute to increased spoilage in fresh food, due to extended time in transit and storage. As food begins its post-harvest transport, it basically becomes invisible, making it difficult to pinpoint what happens to the 5% of our global food supply that never hits shelves due to losses during transit and storage.
Walmart’s new initiative can successfully reduce such effects by creating:
End to end traceability: Track how fresh food really is and how long it’s been traveling in real-time to confidently understand remaining shelf life.
Full transparency: Top-to-bottom visibility into the food chain enables companies to know exactly where food is coming from and the conditions under which it was shipped.
Supply chain efficiency: Access to secure transactional data, temperature data, inventory, etc. allows your team to make proactive decisions based on that data that can optimize and improve efficiencies in the supply chain.
Walmart now traces around 25 products from 5 different suppliers using their blockchain technology developed with the help of IBM. This includes products like strawberries, leafy vegetables, poultry, dairy, pork mangoes, chicken and even multi ingredient products like baby food and salads.
“This solution allows us to see the whole chain in seconds! We can take a jar of baby food and see where it was manufactured and trace back all the ingredients to the farms!” - Frank Yiannas (Walmart's vice president in charge of food safety)
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