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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.
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
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".
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"
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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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.
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!
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"
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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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?