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Walmart has been working on a food safety blockchain solution with IBM, and now announced that all leafy green vegetable suppliers for Sam's and Walmart will be required to submit their data to the blockchain by September 2019.
Manual processes clog up the majority of supply chains. This makes tracking down a problem, such as the E. coli romaine lettuce outbreak from last spring, difficult and time consuming. When a supply chain is put on the blockchain, it becomes more traceable, transparent, and digital. Each node on the blockchain might represent an entity that handled the food on its journey to the store, making it much easier and faster to identify if one of the sick farms sold diseased produce to a certain location.
Walmart has been collaborating with IBM on leveraging blockchain to digitize the food supply chain process for over a year. In fact, supply chain management is one of the most common corporate applications for blockchain (beyond digital currency). The walmart onewire is utilizing the IBM Food Trust Solution, which was created expressly for this use case.
“We developed the IBM Food Trust solution utilizing IBM Blockchain Platform, which is a tool or feature developed by IBM to assist enterprises in developing, governing, and operating blockchain networks. It's based on Hyperledger Fabric (an open-source digital ledger technology) and operates on IBM Cloud, according to Bridget van Kralingen, IBM's senior vice president of global industries, platforms, and blockchain.
It used to take about 7 days to trace the source of food before the procedure was moved to the blockchain. It has been reduced to 2.2 seconds thanks to the blockchain. This significantly minimizes the chances of tainted food reaching the customer.
Understanding that there would be a variety of techniques to getting suppliers to put their information on the blockchain, from paper to Excel spreadsheets to complex ERP systems all uploading data to the blockchain, is one of the issues in requiring suppliers to do so. Molly Blakeman, a Walmart spokesman, says this is something they worked hard to account for with IBM. By no means do suppliers need to be blockchain gurus. They merely need to understand how to use the blockchain application to upload data.
“IBM will provide an onboarding system that will quickly familiarize customers with the service. Consider getting a new iPhone: the instructions are simple to follow, and you're up and running in no time. That's what we're aiming for here. “In order to participate, suppliers will need a smart device and access to the internet,” she explained.
After a year of testing, the company believes it is ready for broader application, with the ultimate goal of ensuring that the food sold at Walmart is safe to eat and, if there is a problem, making auditing the supply chain a simple task.
“Our customers need a supply chain that is more open. We believed that the one-step-forward, one-step-back concept of food traceability was no longer relevant in the twenty-first century. In a statement, Walmart's vice president of food safety, Frank Yiannas, stated, "This is a smart, technology-supported step that will substantially benefit our customers and alter the food system, benefiting all stakeholders."
According to the company, in addition to the blockchain requirement, suppliers must comply to one of the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) criteria, which have been internationally recognized as food safety standards.