For a while, people only thought of blockchain technology being used in financial or even eCommerce spaces. No one would have thought of blockchain technology being used across different industries. Especially when it comes to tangible items. Up until a few years ago, it was discovered that this technology can be taken advantage of by the food industry as well.
The food industry is a huge ecosystem of things ranging from production to marketing. This leads to there being a large number of problems within it that blockchain technology has the capability of improving. A few of these problems include:
- The lack of product traceability
- Counterfeit food products
- Inventory management problems
- Lack of transparency when labeling food products
- Slow product innovation problems
There are many more problems within this industry that require attention, but these are the few that are significant.
But with problems, come solutions.
It has been discovered that blockchain technology can help with these by aiding these problems by:
- Improving food traceability
- Ensuring food safety
- Tracking the industry supplier
- Improving inventory management
- Reducing food waste, etc.
Food traceability is among one of the most important things in this industry. Food distributors are trying to make sure where their food comes from is legit or adheres to their health standards for their customers. Also, customers want to make sure they can trust places to have good food. Food that is fresh and passes health inspections.
In 2018, the company Walmart announced that they would be using blockchain technology to trace where their produce was coming from to verify it. Before using blockchain technology, they would use a team of people to trace what farm their produce came from. These teams would have to trace it using tons of paperwork from many farms, packinghouses, warehouses, brokers, processing facilities, etc. They had to collect all of this data over a month to build their "data set."
It ended up taking them about a week to trace their produce back to a specific farm. This method, for one, is not very time-efficient, neither is it cost-efficient.
Then, Walmart decided to partner with IBM, which helped them use a blockchain to trace their produce. When using this, it only took about 2 seconds to be able to trace where the produce came from. Being such a success, Walmart traces 25+ of their produce using the technology.
To this day, Walmart is not the only company that is using blockchain technology to trace its produce. Other companies that started to do the same are:
*Nestle
*Tyson Foods
*Kraft Heinz
*Bumble Bee Foods
*Anheuser-Busch InBev
plus, many others.
There are so many problems within this industry that make it hard to believe that blockchain technology wouldn't expand and become more popular.
Just like Walmart, many success stories prove that blockchain technology will change the way we do food, forever.