Walmart and Sam's Club have asked all of their leafy-greens suppliers to implement end-to-end traceability back to the farm using blockchain by September 2019
IBM Food Trust spokeswoman Hannah Slocum tells PG that a number of Walmart’s leafy-greens suppliers are already joining the solution. She also says that IBM Food Trust aims to continue to onboard new members and develop new modules for the solution this year.
Another, somewhat smaller blockchain project being tested in the United States is SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain. The solution works alongside various SAP solutions to help build business intelligence for organizations in several industries, including food, transportation and pharmaceuticals, according to Lori Mitchell-Keller, co-president, industries for SAP, based in Newtown Square, Pa. The platform is a blockchain-as-a-service solution.
The solution’s farm-to-consumer capability is designed to “increase food safety confidence for food producers and retailers alike through supply chain trace-and-track technology,” she notes.
On a much smaller scale, Kim recently studied an organic cattle farmer co-op in Arkansas called the Grass Roots Farmers’ Cooperative, which is using a meat product-monitoring blockchain solution developed by London-based Provenance. Consumers can scan QR codes to learn about the meat’s quality, as well as production.
“They have a very straightforward supply chain — the end consumer knows they’re getting something straight from the farm,” he explains. “So the fact that this farm could say, these are the ingredients, these are the qualities of the cow, this is the person who raised the cow … all this provided marketing for their brand.”
For a large-scale poultry farmer, however, there isn’t such a clear case for improved brand recognition, he says.
Ultimately, Kim believes that blockchain will continue to gain steam in the industry, with more proofs of concept in the next few years. At the end of the day, consumers have much to gain from this technology, especially if it prevents wide-scale outbreaks of foodborne illness, but also since it would provide valuable information about the path of food production from farm to fork. It remains to be seen, however, whether individual producers and manufacturers can find real business benefits from using it, versus its being a strategic necessity.
“This may entail getting more technology involved and more use cases,” Kim notes. “I think it will also entail government incentivizing.”
Looking even further into the future, blockchain interoperability, or the idea of blockchains being able to communicate with each other, will need to be explored to make widespread usage possible. For now, though, he says that “it’s too early to talk about that.”