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."

Comments

why blockchain

[KiloByte]

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.