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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.
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".
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.