IBM To Trace Food Contamination With Blockchain (cnbc.com)

Thelasko shares a report from CNBC: IBM has been joined by a group of global food giants including the likes of Nestle, Unilever and Walmart in an effort to reduce food contamination by using blockchain. The corporation announced Tuesday that it would enable global food businesses to use its blockchain network to trace the source of contaminated produce. IBM said that the problem of consumer health suffering at the hands of toxic food could be solved using its distributed ledger technology, which maintains a digital record of transactions rather than a physical one. It would enable food suppliers to source information about the origin, condition and movement of food, and to trace contaminated produce in mere seconds.

Comments

A step farther

[fibonacci8]

Will this help with willful contamination? Soy/corn/wheat byproduct are being added into previously non-soy/corn/wheat byproduct items as additives. Some of the time the additives are labeled, sometimes its "natural flavoring".

Yawn

[sexconker]

A blockchain is just a list.

IBM is going to trace food contamination with a list.

Re:Yawn

[PolygamousRanchKid]

A while back, Europe had a scandal where horse meat was being used in frozen lasagna. It took a bit of detective work to find the supplier who was selling cow meat, but only buying horse meat. A Blockchain could speed up this detective work, with tamper-proof evidence.

Of course, I can't imagine that Big Food are going to be totally happy with this solution. In principle, you could scan your tomatoes, and really see if they came from a hot house in Holland, or a sunny field in Spain.

Big Food won't want to make their supply chain totally transparent to their customers.

New & Improved with Blockchain

[mileshigh]

Looks like blockchain is this year's marketing "it" word, just in time to replace cloud. E.g. "our new word processor is powered by blockchains."

Re:New & Improved with Blockchain

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Everything tastes better with Blockchain.

It's like bacon.

But you are correct, if someone tells me that they want to use a Blockchain, then they had better be able to tell me why they are using one, and what specific advantages over other technologies that it has.

Using a Blockchain just for the sake of using a Blockchain does not cut it. In this case, they want to be able to exactly trace who bought a tin of fish bait, but sold it as caviar.

That is legit.

Re:Why use blockchains?

[hey!]

Specifically blockchain creates a distributed audit trail that is for practical purposes protected by the massive computational resources needed to reconstruct it, and does it in a way in which pseudonymous parties can agree without trusting each other or even knowing who each other is.

Clever as it is, very few applications really have all those requirements. That means that most proposed uses of blockchain are just pointlessly complicated and expensive ways of achieving things that could be accomplished with a few simple cryptographic and data representation conventions. In fact they make ordinary data management tasks incredibly cumbersome. If a bitcoin moves from Alice to Bob to Carol, Carol really wants to make sure that Alice doesn't repudiate the initial transaction with Bob. If company A mistakenly records a transfer to company B, in order to make that fixable you have to build an entire set of practices on top of blockchain to undo what blockchain is supposed to do.

Re:Why use blockchains?

[Applehu Akbar]

The ultimate PR stunt is going to come when someone 3-D prints the first blockchain.