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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.
explain WTF "blockchain" is in words of one syllable
An audit trail.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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
"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
So, instead of getting all this data together in a database with a FK SerialNumber, it stores all the information in something that changes each time it changes hands, thus allowing them to know all information up to when they obtained it, but not afterwards.
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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.
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.
Log of stuff sold and things done
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.
And in the real world every one in the supply chain have to report the logs to either Walmart or IBM, there will most certainly be no decentralized thing about it at all.
So... a blockchain why? Because Wal-Mart doesn't really need anything more than a regular old database for this purpose.