Blockchain
technology is one of the growing technologies in the world and many of
the industries other than Cryptocurrency are adopting the technology.
The blockchain technology is now very popular and industries such as
health, IT, Food, and Economy are adopting it.
Last
month the news came that the Vechain is collaborating with the Walmart
China and Walmart China wants to track the foods items with the help of
blockchain technology. On the other hand, many famous companies such as
Nestlé, Carrefour and Starbucks are stepping into the world of
blockchain with their initiatives powered by blockchain technology.
According
to research, 20% of the global top-10 food grocers will be using
blockchain technology by the year 2025. It is even very clear the
blockchain industry has impacted its influence on the food industry this
year. What the reason behind the success of blockchain in the food
industry and what is the bad impact of it???
More Data empowerment for Customer and tracking illness of food: There
are two main problems have come out. Last year in a research study
conducted by the U.S. based Food Marketing Institution (FMI). They found
in the study that now the people are becoming more health-conscious and
they are concern about the quality and information of the food. They
want transparency in the system.
The
report stated that 75% of the users wanted to switch to the brands or
company who provide more details about the food items on their labels.
Later in 2016, in the same study, only 39% of the people stated that
they would change the brand concerning with the label details of the
food.
And blockchain can solve this issue because of its features such
as easy accessibility, fixed distributed ledger by design, and it can
provide details of the products to the customer easily. The Chief
Marketing Officer at blockchain-based farm-to-table food traceability
company Te-Food, Matron Ven said,
“Food
companies implement traceability because they see that the consumers
require transparency and credibility. Blockchain’s immutability helps
them to prove that the information the different supply chain companies
provide is uncorrupted.”
This
food traceability is not only issues raised by the customers, but the
main purpose of the industry at the big scale to know and investigate
about the illness because of the food products and that should be
stopped at any cost from endangering any human life. Another
San-Francisco based blockchain startup, Ripe.io is functioning with the
food supply chain. The Chief Operating Officer at Ripe.io, Rachel Gabato
said,
“One
of the primary drivers for food providers to consider blockchain
technology is the ability to consider blockchain technology is the
ability of the technology to collect data from various sources and
create a single view of the transaction. This plays an important role in
the ability to track the food product back to its origin driving more
efficiency when a food safety issue arises.”
In
the year 2017, a critical Salmonella outbreak was brought under the
investigation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) which was
earlier linked with the imported papayas from a Mexican farm. Then late
to know the actual cause of the disease, the agency conducted more a
hundred interviews and research studies on various mango samples in the
lab environments. And with the help of the blockchain, we can easily
decrease the procedure of locating the responsible cause and the corrupt
harvester can be easily tracked.
The
food industry has a long chain of participants such as farmers,
vendors, retailers, and shopper, etc.- to keep track of everything is
complicated. This every idea generated the encouragement in the
suppliers and retailers to know the data straightway. The research
associate at Henley Business School said,
“A
key benefit not discussed is the fact that data needs to be cleansed,
structured and verified before it goes onto a Blockchain. This is one of
the key benefits and in the use cases I have examined closely, 75% of
the effort was in fixing the data.”
IBM’s domination in the blockchain providing solution: IBM’s
Food Trust is dominating the industry of blockchain tracking solution
and it is based on the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain protocol. With
providing the first product tracking solution to Walmart China in
December 2016. They are getting big clients such as Nestle, Dole Food,
Carrefour, Kroger, and Unilever. The stage officially went live on in
October 2018. As the IBM “millions of individual food products” were
traced by retailers with the help of Food Trust blockchain.
IBM
has also signed Albertsons Companies, another main food, and drug
retailer in the U.S. They will use it first to trace the supply chain
for romaine lettuce and then on the other products. Recently, the news
came out that the U.S. seafood trade association National Fisheries
Institute (NFI) is also working along with IBM and using Food Trust to
track seafood. This is first of its kind and now it’s joined by other
companies. A few months ago North America’s biggest self-stable brand of
seafood branch, Bumble Bee Foods has introduced a blockchain stage for
tracing their seafood alliancing with SAP, a German tech company.
Earlier
for expanding the reach of Food Trust members, IBM blockchain has done a
partnership with Nestle in April, and France based retail company
Carrefour. The Carrefour is tracking the chain of Mousseline. They
provided the customer to scan QR and know the details regarding the
product.
New tools will emerge based on blockchain traceability: As
the market technology ever since developing, Carrefour has launched its
own blockchain solution for tracking their milk, named as Carrefour
Quality Line (CQL). CQL promises the users to have total traceability
for the whole supply chain. The user will even get the GPS coordinates
of the producer farmer of the milk. Another project initiative related
to blockchain technology is the U.S. National Pork Board alliancing with
Ripe.io to examine the supply chains of pork.
The Representative of the company stated,
“The
ripe.io platform will enable the NPB ecosystem of pork producers to
monitor, evaluate and continuously improve their sustainability
practices based on six defined ethical principles guiding the U.S. pork
industry. These principles provide industry standards in food safety and
public health, animal well-being, protecting the environment, and
improving the quality of life for the industry’s people and
communities.”
More
of this, in the starting of 2019, World Wildlife Fund-Australia and
Global Corporate Venture BCG Digital Ventures together introduced a
blockchain-based supply chain tool named as OpenSC. It provides the
facility to track their producing products. In July, Nestle also joined
OpenSc for tracing milk from farms and producers in New Zealand for
supplying it in the firms in the middle east.
Blockchain is different niches: Alcohol and Coffee: The
popularity of the blockchain is increasing in beverage and alcohol
industry. The news came out in March that the premium Scotch Whisky
brand Ailsa Bay will be introducing the world’s first tracing scotch
whiskey with the blockchain-powered system. The U.K.’s auditing firm
E&Y also declared that they will bring blockchain solution across
Asian countries to know the quality and authenticity of imported
European Wines.
Starbucks’s
“bean to cup” initiative is that the company will implement the I.T.
giant Microsoft’s blockchain service Azure to trace the production of
its coffee and coffee provided to them allegedly from the farmers of
Rwanda, Colombia and Costa Rica with more economic independence.
Co-signing the technology by China’s food industry: Chinese
food and beverage industry which held the record high of 4.27 trillion
yuan ($620 billion) in revenue last year are now also showing interest
in blockchain. The official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party has
reported in January that their Food and Drug Administration Chinese
Chongqing Yuzhong District is going to implement blockchain to make the
supervision of food and drug quality strong and assured with tracing the
life-cycle of products.
Walmart
China has also collaborated with VeChain’s Thor blockchain. Like the
press release, the Walmart China blockchain traceability platform
(WCBTP) will be an alliance venture by the VeChain, PwC, Walmart China,
Inner Mongolia Kerchin and the China Chain-Store and Franchise
Association.
Presently
the Walmart China has traced the supplies of 23 products and soon will
release another 100 products. On the other hand, their neighbour
Vietnam, there the Te-Food has currently implemented blockchain-powered
traceability at Vinamilk, one of the biggest dairy companies in the
Southeast Asian countries.
Most
of the companies are tracking their food for their safety. Earlier in
April, Swiss food technology company Buhler has launched two
blockchain-ready products: Laatu, a tool targeting to decrease microbial
contamination in dry goods, and Tubex Pro, a scaling system that
self-optimizes and produces a continues flow of the produced data. The
Bulher tools are connected with the Internet of Things(IoT) service,
which hosted by Azure cloud platform of Microsoft.
As
per the information of the company Laatu can destroy over 99.999% of
salmonella and maintain the nutritional quality of food. Also, Iota
Foundation has teamed up with the digital food safety management firm
Priority in the month of June. It also enables the user to check the
different variety of foods for allergens. And it also provides the
customer with the detail of food products by scanning the barcode on the
app.
Possible problems: The
food industry is adopting blockchain technology but it has limitations
too. The data entered into blockchain systems by the supplier is not
guaranteed to be sure, but the technology ensures the prevention of the
tampering or entering of false in the last stages. In most cases, it is
difficult to collect and digitize the date because of numerous different
setups utilized by suppliers, Ripe.io’s Gabor says,
“As
we have engaged with the farmers in the food areas of dairy, meat,
produce, citrus, commodities, a primary challenge is the access and
availability of data. Farmers capture data in many different forms and
the ability to digitize this data for capture and sharing has been our
primary challenge.”
“The main challenges of implementations are not blockchain-related, ” assured Marton Ven from Te-Food. He further said,
“The
hardest obstacle comes from collecting data from a large number of
different companies. In recent decades, supply chains have become
global, sometimes incorporating hundreds of companies from different
countries, with different technological maturity, using different
identification methodologies.
Keeping the data integrity – which is the
backbone of traceability – requires all of them to actively cooperate on
what data to collect, how to capture the data, and how to compile the
information into meaningful product data, which the consumers can read.”
As
per Keogh, there is another problem that needs the attention that if
blockchain becomes compliant with the present GS1 standards. The food
industry mainly depends upon them to format their data for
communications sharing across supply chains before the blockchain
technology.
Keogh
said, “In this context, a Blockchain should be viewed as an outcome of a
configuration of multiple technologies, tools and methods and hence
interoperability is a critical component.
The Blockchain solutions using
the GS1 standards for product identification, company identification,
location identification and the joint GS1/ISO interoperability standards
called Electronic Product Code Information System (EPICS) will excel in
this space.”
As
an academic’s view, the blockchain is like a record-keeping solution
and not traceability. The state of supply chains in the food industry
will immensely depend on how these blockchain-based solutions are
implemented:
“WalMarts’
strategy with a single platform from IBM Food Trust is an example of
both progress and a hurdle at the same time. […] I would have preferred
to see WalMart providing a blockchain-enabled, standards-based platform
and then their hundreds of suppliers who will use dozens of Blockchain
solutions being able to connect and share a vendor lock-in is
counterintuitive in the evolving Blockchain world.”
Ven
agreed, “As traceability throughout food supply chains barely exists
worldwide, blockchain has a good chance to become the de facto standard
technology for it.” He further added, “But to provide global solution,
other standards have to be applied as well, like GS1 standards for
identification and event structure.”
Therefore,
more and more suppliers and retailers are joining with blockchain
companies or firms. The experts were stressing about the blockchain
adoption inside the field, but it is not much about concluding out the
technology as the shortage of proper data analysis in the first place.
Ven told,
“We
haven’t ever met any food company which refused to use blockchain.
Although solution providers have to put in a lot of education effort,
food companies are open to the idea of using blockchain. Certainly, the
media hype around blockchain helps this effort, but 90% of the
implementation challenges are not blockchain-related ones.”
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