Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Walmart Tests Blockchain For Use In Food Recalls (bloomberg.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the foiling-foodborne-diseases dept.

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."

6 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. how about barcodes? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    UPS, FexEx, etc. track packages with barcodes, no need for blockchain.

    1. Re:how about barcodes? by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 3, Insightful

      A barcode is not a Fedex tracking number. A barcode is just a way to encode numbers in a machine-readable way. A tracking number uniquely identifies a single package. Blame the person who modded the information-free anonymous comment +1.

      --
      Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
    2. Re:how about barcodes? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      if you want to track individual items, then slap a QR code onto each product with its serial number. Problem solved.

      there's absolutely nothing that a write-only ledger (block chains) solves that a regular ledger (in a database, or just an append only file, etc.) cannot solve...

  2. This is a great opportunity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:What? by davide+marney · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "The only thing good about blockchain tech is that its decentralized." Which is exactly the situation with our food chain, which involves hundreds of decentralized participants. So, blockchain makes a ton of sense.

    --
    "We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
  4. Re:Much more than barcodes by beaker_72 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    OK so I've read the IBM announcement and you're right that is what they're using blockchain for. However I don't see how this adds any value over and above the use of a standard relational database. To track the source of an offending item of produce, that item is going to need some kind of unique identifier - regardless of where the chain of custody data is held. A unique identifier can be used to access the relevant information in a database. How does blockchain improve on that?