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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."
Blockchains in the big box chains gon' rock change. Strange.
by Cyphase ( 907627 )
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.
Yes, but you need a blockchain to make your cloud-based internet of things 2.0 social mining semantic smart-city experiment.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
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
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.