The consortium includes Dole, food safety such as cross-contamination, Driscoll’s, Golden State Foods, the spread of food-borne illness, Kroger, McCormick and Company, unnecessary waste and the economic McLane Company, Nestlé, Tyson burden of recalls are magnified by lack Foods, Unilever and Walmart, of access to information and traceability. who will all work with IBM to identify It can take weeks to identify the precise new areas where the global supply point of contamination, causing chain can benefit from blockchain. further illness, lost revenue and wasted product. For example, it took more Every year, one-in-ten people fall ill - and than two months to identify the farm 400,000 die - because of contaminated source of contamination in a recent food. Many of the critical issues impacting incidence of salmonella in papayas. www.foodtechnology.co.nz 27 Blockchain is ideally suited to help address these challenges because it establishes a trusted environment for all transactions. In the case of the global food supply chain, all participants - growers, suppliers, processors, distributors, retailers, regulators and consumers - can gain permissioned access to known and trusted information regarding the origin and state of food for their transactions. This can enable food providers and other members of the ecosystem to use a blockchain network to trace contaminated product to its source in a short amount of time to ensure safe removal from store shelves to stem the spread of illnesses. Together, these leading companies will help identify and prioritise new areas where blockchain can benefit food ecosystems and inform new IBM solutions. This work will draw on multiple IBM pilots and production networks in related areas that successfully demonstrate ways in which blockchain can positively impact global food traceability. Unlike any technology before it, blockchain is transforming the way like-minded organisations come together, and enabling a new level of trust based on a single view of the truth. IBM’s work with organisations across the food ecosystem, as well as its new platform, will further unleash the vast potential of this technology, making it faster for organisations of all sizes and in all industries to move from concept to production, to improve the way business gets done. In parallel trials in China and the US, IBM and Walmart recently demonstrated that blockchain can be used to track a product from the farm through every stage of the supply chain, right to the retail shelf, in seconds instead of days or weeks. These trials also demonstrated that stakeholders throughout the global food supply chain view food safety as a collaborative issue, rather than a competitive one, and are willing to work together to improve the food system for everyone. According to Walmart vice president of food safety Frank Yiannis, his company is an advocate for greater transparency in the food system to benefit customers. “Blockchain technology enables a new era of end-to-end transparency in the global food system – equivalent to shining a light on food ecosystem participants that will further promote responsible actions and behaviours. It also allows all participants to share information rapidly and with confidence across a strong trusted network. This is critical to ensuring that the global food system remains safe for all.” As a customer and partner with IBM for more than 40 years, Golden State Foods says it is pleased to collaborate with IBM and this group of trusted food companies. “Safety is a key value for Kroger, and our partnership with IBM positions us to explore and test blockchain technology as a solution for enhanced food safety across our business,” vice president of corporate food technology and regulatory compliance Howard Popoola says. “Food safety is a universal priority for food retailers and companies. It’s not a competitive advantage; it benefits our customers to have greater transparency and traceability in the supply chain.” And Tyson Foods senior vice president of food safety and quality assurance Scott Stillwell says producing safe food “is critical to our business; it appears blockchain can help provide trust not only about the origin of food, but also about how that food moved through the supply chain.” For developers, easy and flexible network tools are designed to bring blockchain networks up to speed in minutes. The platform offers all participating members a level of control, while preventing any one member from having exclusive control, and a new class of democratic governance tools is designed to help improve productivity across the organisations using a voting process that collects signatures from members to govern member invitation distribution of smart contracts and creation of transactions channels. The platform is underpinned by an architecture that operates more than 55% of today’s global transactional systems. Blockchain Services consultants can apply design thinking to help enterprises conceptualise and implement blockchain enabled business models to realise optimal value. For example, during recent blockchain projects with major shipping and retail organisations, IBM consultants were able to improve food safety traceability by 99.9%and decrease trade document workflow by 97%, potentially unlocking millions of dollars in cost savings and market capital. Marie Wieck is general manager of IBM Blockchain.
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