BUSINESS: Research + Stats How Blockchain Can Make Food Safer By Andrew Karp Tuesday, July 30, 2019 8:00 AM At the 2019 Vision Monday Global Leadership Summit, Janine Grasso, IBM’s vice president, strategy, operations and ecosystem development for blockchain, told attendees how blockchain can improve efficiency and safety in the food supply chain for food, which brings together growers, packagers, processors and grocers across multiple regions and countries. She offered an example of how IBM used blockchain to help Walmart find the source of tainted lettuce being sold in its stores. “It was taking Walmart too long to figure out where this [unsafe] food was on the shelf and which farm it came from,” Grasso explained. “What was happening is that they would have to remove all of the inventory, and they were literally throwing thousands or millions of dollars worth of food out because they didn’t want to take a risk.” One category where Walmart tested the technology was produce, and it found that while previously it might take a few weeks to track an item’s journey back to the farm, with blockchain technology this tracking of an item back to the farm where it originated could be done in two seconds. There are now 500 SKUs using blockchain technology in the supply chain process, which has greatly increased the transparency from “farm to fork,” she said. In a recent LinkedIn blog post and infographic, Gerry Power, managing director at the Dublin-based consulting company Yes Dynamic Ltd., also made the case for tapping blockchain’s power to improve efficiency in the global food supply chain. “Today’s supply chains are an unwieldy mass of links and players,” Power noted. “In these complex data heavy environments, lack of transparency and data integrity are rampant leading to inefficiencies and wastage, and increasingly regular instances of food recalls. Population growth has led to rocketing demand for food and medicines, while rising operational costs have led to retailers and manufacturers expanding their search for suppliers to all corners of the globe. The food supply chain is creaking under the pressure and dealing with fifty times more data today than just five years ago. With so much data, processes and players, inefficiencies and delays have become a standard part of the supply chain. “Blockchain promises to transform this market: to do for transactions what the internet has done for information. In the same way, the internet has opened up siloed information databases, improved communication, collaboration and the transparency of data and its source, blockchain can open up transactions through its distributed ledger. Due to its decentralized nature, blockchain delivers transparency and trust by default.” Source: Yes Dynamic Ltd.