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Nestle Experiments with Tracking Gerber Baby Food on the Blockchain (wsj.com)
Nestle SA is putting some of its Gerber baby food products on a food-tracking blockchain to test whether the technology can trace the fruits and vegetables that go into its purees and squeezable pouches. From a report: Nestle's effort is part of a wider food-industry exercise aimed at improving food recalls by using the technology behind bitcoin to trace a worldwide ingredient supply chain. Food recalls can diminish consumer confidence and lead to lost sales. News of tainted baby food hits an especially sensitive nerve -- stakes that in part prompted Nestle to choose a popular variety of its Gerber linefor its blockchain test, said Chris Tyas, global head of supply chain at the Swiss company. Nestle offers more than 2,000 brands, including Haagen-Dazs, Stouffer's and Poland Spring. Nestle also sees the move as a way to generate customer trust everyday and during recalls. "People want to know, quite rightly, where ingredients they give to their baby have come from," he said. "We wanted a product in which trust meant something."
Why in the blazes they would even think about using blockchain (other than some C*O critter not knowing what buzzwords mean)? You pay a large cost for making data processed by untrusted nodes non-repudiable. The company controls all its data processing, and even if its distributed, can use far cheaper ways to ensure lack of tampering once a piece of data is committed, such as a simple hash of a block sent home when the block itself sits in the local database.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I don't see how blockchain helps in most situations. It's great for untrusted parties but for Nestle as well as most other companies trying to deploy blockchain, it seems like a secure centralized database would have less overhead. What advantage does giving each tomato a blockchain address have over giving each tomato a serial number? What advantage does recording each step a tomato takes in a blockchain have over just recording each step in a centralized database?
I've been in the bitcoin community since 2009. Let me help you with this story. Blockchain technology has nothing to do with any of this. It doesn't assist in logistics in any way. It helps untrusted entities prove they submitted data correctly and one time. The end. If you don't trust your logistics workers and truck drivers and warehouse staff, fire them. Blockchain technology is for customer-facing systems not internal product tracking.
HANG THE TRAITORS HIGH
If the Blockchain is there as a distributed database for reasons of trustworthiness,
then what is Nestle saying of their suppliers if a standard object orientated database can't handle the job?
The truth of the matter is, if you can't trust your supply and distribution chains to enter tracking information into a regular database, the blockchain isn't going to fix it.
The title is wrong. Nothing is tracked "on" a blockchain. The blockchain is used as an immutable, append-only ledger (that may or may not be distributed). The fact that each entry is hashed/data integrity record is added is unremarkable. There is nothing new or novel in that - it has been dome multiple times since the 60s. The proper word is "with".
This is one of the few cases where I don't think it's just buzzword marketing. Everyone saying this is an "internal" tracking issue must have never heard the phrase "global supply chain". They're not just trying to track their internal logistics, they're trying to push verifiable tracking out to all their suppliers.
Devil in the details, blah blah ... I know, but this isn't obviously stupid.
Nope, no sig
They use it precisely because their trusted partners are not entirely trustworthy. Bad actors, like bad tomatoes, can be found everywhere. It only takes one bad link, say a bad HR director, to compromise the trustworthiness of an organization. This system makes everyone accountable, down to the individual.
An individual farmer takes their celery to a local company or co-op, who has contracts with a nationwide or regional distributor.
The local company hands the shipment over to a shipping company, which brings them to a distributor.
The distributor sells them to Nestle/Gerber, through another shipping company.
Nestle sends some of it to their Gerber plant across town, some of it to their Maggi soup factory, etc.
After making the food from the ingredients, Nestle sells the baby stew to a grocery wholesaler. Another shipper.
The grocery wholesaler sells it to a small local store chain.
The store chain sends some of it to the store on Broadway.
The customer purchases it.
There are two big advantages of a block chain vs a traditional database here. That's a lot of different companies involved, in including a few trucking companies. They don't all use the same Oracle database, especially not the local farmer. Block chain is designed for many different people to be able to use it, adding entries, without conflicting with other in any way.
Nestle, and the customer, want to know that the local produce buyer isn't being lazy and making up records at the end of each week or each month. Everyone, including purchasers, can see that the local produce buyer added their first entry shortly after farmer adds "sold lot #74728 to Des Moines Produce Buyers".
How does it work in the real world when the entered and now immutable data was inaccurate at entry time?
People talking about tracking environmental conditions and what not... How does blockchain defend/prevent false readings being entered in the first place?
Why not a central database or even a set of distributed database servers that allow a federated query of where the tomato went on it's journey to the table?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
"Blockchain! We don't know what it is but every time a company uses it in a press statement their stock price goes up. Let's do it"
If you're wanting to use blockchain to establish trust in the food supply then you need to cover more than just the raw ingredients:
Focusing the blockchain on the raw ingredients is a very blinkered and unhelpful view of the whole process.
Nestle has used modern slave labor for years. They came up with using block-chain to prove they're coming clean. Of course that's just as good as the people making entries on the chain.
They are working to cleanse themselves of the slavery image.
They've used it in their cocoa and coffee supply. They pretty much act like it "slips into the chain" these days, but when they were first found out they seemed more upset they were caught than anything. The older articles are getting harder to find.
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Why the fuck use blockchain like this? I can track my post with a tracking number... why would this need to be any different? Just assign a range of QR codes, unique for supplier and batch, to food sources and track them.
The world of technology is approaching 100% buzzword.
See, I wouldn't hate the TDS spammers as much if they were at least humorous.
There are two big advantages of a block chain vs a traditional database here. That's a lot of different companies involved, in including a few trucking companies. They don't all use the same Oracle database, especially not the local farmer.
So get some intern to spend 15 minutes writing a data conversion+import script?
Everyone, including purchasers, can see that the local produce buyer added their first entry shortly after farmer adds "sold lot #74728 to Des Moines Produce Buyers".
What kind of fucking loser is going to trace the supply chain for the tomatos in their baby food? Even if there was a demand for it, why couldn't you do the same thing with a normal database? Are you claiming Gerber would forge the data to cover up their fraudulent tomatos?
Anonymously?
I think you mean âoelike Trumpâ ...
Maybe they can track how many babies are malnourished due to diluted formula made from impure water prompted by Nestle's aggressive marketing in developing nations.
Central database is easier to hack and modify, harder to manage. Each vendor is responsible for their âoepieceâ of the chain, passing it on to the next guy in line. Data integrity is preserved by the crypto aspects of the blockchain as well as the distributed copies. Basically its SVN versus GIT.
I'm not quite sure how you Nestele is going to get farmers shipping companies, local stores to spend scarce resources diligently updating the blockchain, especially since it doesn't integrate with their accounting systems.
Walmart, Nestle, Dole, Unilever and the other companies who started this project buy over $500 billion of food every year. If you want to sell food, you just might want these companies as customers.
Then there are network effects. Suppose a broker sells avocados to both Nestle and Kraft. Because they sell to Nestle, they and their growers use the block chain. So Kraft is buying from a participating broker, even though Kraft doesn't care. After the next horsemeat scandal or e coli incident, Walmart says to Kraft "we'd really like you to participate in the chain. BTW we're about to place an order for 250,000 cases of pizzas. If we get them from Nestle, they'll already be in the block chain. If we buy from you, tracing an outbreak could take weeks, right?" So Kraft joins. Which in turn encourages anyone doing business with Kraft to join.
For two comparisons, consider the UPC codes which are now on almost all products. When I was a little kid, most stores didn't have bar code scanners. They were really expensive. Most products didn't bother asking UPC codes. Several large players insisted on bar codes and through that it became an industry standard, which now saves everyone money and makes checkout go much faster.
UL listing is an example that is expensive for manufacturers. But if manufacturers don't have their electrical products UL tested, Walmart won't buy them. Therefore, manufacturers pay the expense of having their products tested, because they want to sell to Walmart, Target, Home Depot, etc.
You make no sense.
Anyone in a block chain can manage their own database if they want to track that shit. It doesn't have to be a central database.
You can requiring signing for all messages in any form of database. You don't need block chain for message signing.
You can have distributed copies of anything you want.
> Nestle or the brokers will not have a very easy time convincing hundred's if not thousands of farms
If you're a farmer, who exactly do you think is going to buy your 3 million head of lettuce that are ready for harvest on a 100 acre farm, if not Dole, not the food processors like Nestle* or Unilever, and not the brokers? Do you think you're going to sell 3 million at head to consumers at the local farmers market this weekend?
* If you're an American, you might associate the Nestle name with chocolate. Nestle also owns over 2,000 other brands. Here are just a few of their frozen food brands:
Buitoni
California Pizza Kitchen
Delissio Pizza
DiGiorno Pizza
Hot Pockets
Jack's Pizza
La Cocinera
Lean Cuisine
Lean Pockets
Papa Giuseppe
Stouffer's
Sweet Earth Foods
Tombstone Pizza
Wagner Pizza
They aren't just frozen food, either. They produce everything from Purina to most of the yogurt brands to Gerber and shredded wheat cereal.
I don't trust these new blockchain things. They've not been proven to be safe and I don't want them anywhere near my baby's food. You just lost a customer, Nestlé!
So basically you have no fucking clue what the blockchain is.
Okay, genuine question here: is it not the case that all blockchains are vulnerable to someone simply hiring enough CPU time to outvote the rest of the "miners"? So, anyone wanting to use it to track things like university degrees or food shipments or whatever, has to more or less single-handedly try to keep ahead of anyone who thinks of a way to make money by taking the chain over even for a day using AWS or something. Is that right?
I'm sure this exposes my ignorance but it's been bothering me since someone at work suggested using the blockchain for tracking something.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Yep, lets have a log of absolutely everything created ... and then lets duplicate it through many many users.
Makers of storage rejoice. The rest of us can watch the world burn.
There are two big advantages of a block chain vs a traditional database here. That's a lot of different companies involved, in including a few trucking companies. They don't all use the same Oracle database, especially not the local farmer. Block chain is designed for many different people to be able to use it, adding entries, without conflicting with other in any way.
There are 14 standards. We've made a standard to unite them all.
See the problem?
Let me spell it out for you: They don't all use the same Oracle database, so you stood up another Oracle database so they can all use that.
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Sorry, and even though we're 'thinking of the children' here, Nestle should be outright boycotted on all fronts.
Any company whose position essentially boils down to, 'water should never be free', needs to be run out of business.
So they make Gerber? Thanks for reminding me. I'd forgotten, especially since I'm looking to have children in a few years.
If someone could post that master graphic of the 3-4 'mega-companies' that seemingly own most every consumer product lines, that would be great. I have it somewhere around here, just not readily available.
Also mangoes https://blog.coinspectator.com/2018/08/01/nestle-taps-blockchain-to-track-baby-milk-from-farm-to-mouth/
On the one hand the end users (bug suppliers) get non-repudiable and prooven leger of their suppliers transactions on the other every party is basically exposing their business business flat to the competitors. Everybody will see what everybody else is doing on the real time. Suppliers can eliminate middle man by learning their suppliers. Vendors can peek competitors plans and business models. Unless this is somehow addressed in a way that doesn't break the whole blockchain idea joining such a network would be a business suicide.
2nd issue I've always had with such a private small blockchains is how will the >50% hack be prevented. And what are rewards that keep the parties invest more and more processing power to prevent that in the long run?