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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'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.