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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."
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".
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.
because it is difficult to agree on one central authority to store all the data. it is also insecure to have one authority. blockchain is a sort o distributed database - it's just a superior solution that is standardised, without counterparty risk and entirely in the cloud. why design some new solution when these things have already been figured out? there are many blockchain companies working on global supply chains - some prefer more centralised solutions and some less.
No. Stupid. Dumb. Stop. Shut the fuck up.
Text file.
Product code.
Serial.
Location.
Date.
Some form of newline character (LF, CR, or both - I don't care). Hell, make it XML for all I fucking care.
Sign it with a private key.
Let anyone in the world mirror it.
Let anyone in the world throw it into a proper DB if they want to actively work with it.
Want to provide an API to access it? HTTP GET. Or maybe host your own database and let the world connect to it.
Block chains solve ZERO problems.
Distributed block chains solve ONE problem. You don't need a distributed block chain to solve this problem. You need distribution.
Public distributed block chains solve TWO problems. You don't need a public distributed block chain to solve these problems. You need public distribution.