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Walmart Tests Blockchain For Use In Food Recalls (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a Bloomberg article about Walmart:
Like most merchants, the world's largest retailer struggles to identify and remove food that's been recalled. When a customer becomes ill, it can take days to identify the product, shipment and vendor. With the blockchain, Wal-Mart will be able to obtain crucial data from a single receipt, including suppliers, details on how and where food was grown and who inspected it... "If there's an issue with an outbreak of E. coli, this gives them an ability to immediately find where it came from. That's the difference between days and minutes," says Marshal Cohen, an analyst at researcher NPD Group Inc...."
In October, Wal-Mart started tracking two products using blockchain: a packaged produce item in the U.S., and pork in China. While only two items were included, the test involved thousands of packages shipped to multiple stores... If Wal-Mart adopts the blockchain to track food worldwide, it could become of the largest deployments of the technology to date.
America's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates roughly their recalls affect roughly 48 million people annually, according to the article, "with 128,000 hospitalized and 3,000 dying."
In October, Wal-Mart started tracking two products using blockchain: a packaged produce item in the U.S., and pork in China. While only two items were included, the test involved thousands of packages shipped to multiple stores... If Wal-Mart adopts the blockchain to track food worldwide, it could become of the largest deployments of the technology to date.
America's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates roughly their recalls affect roughly 48 million people annually, according to the article, "with 128,000 hospitalized and 3,000 dying."
UPS, FexEx, etc. track packages with barcodes, no need for blockchain.
Blockchains in the big box chains gon' rock change. Strange.
by Cyphase ( 907627 )
Not that there is anything wrong with it, but we see the crux of the matter with this quote: "It’s also the difference between pulling a few tainted packages and yanking all the spinach from hundreds of stores"
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Okay, reading through that article it uses 'blockchain' repeatedly without introducing the concept or defining anything it does/offers.
It can be summed up as 'Walmart testing thing IBM wants to sell to everyone' gg, we're done here. All aboard the hype train!
But, Anonymous Coward, it's a decentralized private cloud immutable ledger system! It's the future. Right, right, I give you it's a novel use of the underlying mechanism of bitcoin... take an open source project, wrap your head around it and sell it as IBM. Neat. It's still a cringe amount of buzzword bingo. It's still not clear from all the hype why taking business analytics + buzzword > business analytics.
This is a great opportunity for some knowledgeable person to explain WTF "blockchain" is in words of one syllable, so those of us who don't want to wallow in cryptological minutia can have at least a casual grasp of WTH is going on here.
Just saying. Damn jargon is hip-deep around here sometimes.
Gotta find a nail, gotta find a nail.. damn, that screw could be a nail!,
Is there a reason walmart cannot just run a central database with a bunch of submitted information? The only thing good about blockchain tech is that its decentralized.
Sadly, the article is silent on some important details. If you dig into the IBM announcement, you find that they are putting the entire chain of custody records into a blockchain, from source to the consumer -- all the things that traditionally would have gone into production logs, shipping manifests, etc. right down to the final delivery to the home. So, much, much more than what can be contained in a tracking barcode.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
America's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates roughly their recalls affect roughly 48 million people annually, according to the article, "with 128,000 hospitalized and 3,000 dying."
I think you meant to say:
America's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates roughly their recalls affect roughly 48 million people roughly annually, according to the article, "with roughly 128,000 hospitalized and roughly 3,000 dying."
UPS, FexEx, etc. track packages with barcodes, no need for blockchain.
A barcode doesn't track anything nor can it realistically be updated once it has been created. They use a database to track packages. The barcodes are merely a means of quickly "typing" a bit of data at a physical location - the database is what actually keeps track of things. Barcodes become cumbersome as a means of identifying specific packages when you get to very large volumes. UPS deals with about 15 million packages per day. A big number but nothing like what would be necessary for real time tracking of what Walmart is looking at doing. Walmart deals with tens of billions of individual product transactions so the complexity is substantially higher. There is a big difference in data and complexity between shipping a single box of 100 widgets versus knowing the entire supply chain history for each and every one of those 100 widgets.
Stop importing pork from China. You wouldn't know what kind of filth would be in that.
Is there a reason walmart cannot just run a central database with a bunch of submitted information?
Yes. First off there are few/no standards in place to do it nor much infrastructure for real time tracking of this information currently. All this will have to be created from scratch and so they are experimenting with various technologies for doing just that. This is one of those experiments. Second, our food supply chain is hugely decentralized and tracking the transaction records is currently very cumbersome. Since we need to know the origin of products it makes sense to adapt a technology which is built specifically to accurately and transparently log the transaction history of a given item.
The only thing good about blockchain tech is that its decentralized.
No that isn't the only good thing about it. It's pretty useful for logging transaction histories which has nothing inherently to do with being centralized or decentralized. This feature of blockchains is probably FAR more useful to supply chains than it is for currencies. Bitcoin and the like are cute experiments that probably will never amount to much but blockchain tech has potential applications well beyond crypto-currencies which are probably far more economically valuable than bitcoin could ever hope to be.
It seems you're thinking of Universal Product Codes (UPC), the bar code found on nearly every packaged product you buy. That's the most common use of bar codes.
You may notice that some products
have two or three different bar codes on them, the UPC code that's scanned when you check out, and also others. At the bottom of the windshield on your car, you'll see your VIN as both human-readable numbers and also as a bar code. If you have a supermarket loyalty card, it probably has a bar code on the back identifying your card vs someone else's.
ONE thing that bar codes are used for is UPC, but they can be used for anything that's printable as text, and are used for many purposes, not just for UPC codes.
Next time you get tickets to a show, take a look and you'll probably see a bar code on the ticket, which is your specific ticket number.
Walmart was a huge proponent of AS2 to talk to its suppliers back in the day. And I remember the pharmas here in the US were playing with AS2 to do "pedigrees" that tracked product from endpoint to endpoint. So...why isn't Walmart looking at AS2 (or AS4) to do the same here?
and this is exactly why I eat all of my food direct from farmers. blockchain shmockchain, walmart kills 50 times more people than sharks. so many that they need this much technology just to track it! none of this actually stops the food from being tainted.
Like I've said before, I don't want walmart to take back the bad food. I want them to be horrified that their food was tainted. Alas, it is not their food, and hence they don't give a shit. They care only about their dollars.
So, I buy directly from the farmers around me. If a tomato is bad, I know the person who touched it over 50 times to grow it from a seed. If the chicken's bad, I know its name and its god damned educational history. And if a steak is bad, I know the guy who planted the grass.
What a concept.
So... a blockchain why? Because Wal-Mart doesn't really need anything more than a regular old database for this purpose.
ISO 9001: The Home Game
Original IBM press release
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/50816.wss
OK, I'll be the one to say it: I still don't see the point.
If you squint a little bit so the algorithms being used go out of focus, what you see is system into which information about events is entered and then extracted later to form an audit trail. This could be done on a stupendous scale with any kind of eventually consistent database.
The usefulness of blockchain is that it implements authentication and non-repudiation without the need for (or indeed possibility of) of a central authority. For example, you need something like blockchains for Bitcoin so that a court can't take your drug profits away without your cooperation. They can torture you until you give up your password, they can install a keylogger on your computer to steal it, but they can't simply declare that bitcoins in your "possession" are now in the state treasury. Bitcoins are designed not to leave your possession until you say they do. Or at least some piece of software in possession of your cryptographic secrets.
From a system design standpoint that's interesting, but it doesn't mean you need to bake that property into everything.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Fact: tracking the source of a potentially tainted product from a single receipt, instantly, can be helpful in finding the tainted product, testing it, stopping its distribution if necessary, and notifying the purchasers.
Fluff: rather than use a bunch of simple database joins, we used a distributed cryptographic system providing reliable attestation of a transaction without dependence on a particular server, together with anonymity. We also swat mosquitoes with atomic bombs.
Bruce Perens.
Wal-Mart customer service employees never seem to have any sense of urgency when I have an issue. They appear comptent and are usually pleasant enough. They just don't move very quickly. How will Wal-Mart make sure that tainted food issues are handled immediately by people that are used to treating everything one way. Will there by a hotline, or are we expected to return with a receipt to customer service, who then may or may not act quickly. A plan doesn't work if the human training isn't complete.
That's just tracking, aggregation and serialization, same as what is currently being implemented for pharma - a standard that all players in the industry have to conform to by 2017. That will fail at that, as the current project pipeline at my company demonstrates.
Difference is that they're doing this with their own database rather than a national / international one with common formats, like GTIN.
I'm guessing blockchain is a way to get their aggregation "naturally" (as in, you can deduct relationships between codes with the codes themselves), without having to commit an aggregation to the database.
Smart.
You can always compute nested sets from adjacent lists like people are suggesting if the entire adjacent list is on one cloud or system, but you can lose a whole branch if you lose a link instead of only losing that one link if one supplier is non-conforming or offline. It's not fake or fluff, it's error minimizing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13010016
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