cageymaru
Fully [H]
- Joined
- Apr 10, 2003
- Messages
- 22,086
Walmart and Sam's Club will work with IBM to start using blockchain to track suppliers of fresh, leafy green crops in real-time as the products are transported from the farm to the store. This is being done to better combat food safety incidents such as outbreaks of Salmonella or E. coli. Blockchain adds end-to-end traceability of the produce from farm to table.
Since the tracking and crop information is digitized as data, the source of an outbreak can be traced in a couple of seconds. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) previously had to wait at least a week for a single shipment of product to be traced back to the source of origin as everything was done with pen and paper ledgers. To put how much time can be saved into context, Walmart stocks over 70,000 different food products in a single grocery store.
"Enhanced ability to trace a contaminated food back to its source will help government agencies and companies to identify the source of a foodborne disease outbreak, coordinate more effective recalls of foods thought to be contaminated, and learn where past problems began. We think these steps will strengthen future prevention efforts and better protect the public's health from the threat of foodborne illness." - Robert Tauxe, MD, director of CDC’s Division of Foodborne, Waterborne, and Environmental Diseases
Since the tracking and crop information is digitized as data, the source of an outbreak can be traced in a couple of seconds. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) previously had to wait at least a week for a single shipment of product to be traced back to the source of origin as everything was done with pen and paper ledgers. To put how much time can be saved into context, Walmart stocks over 70,000 different food products in a single grocery store.
"Enhanced ability to trace a contaminated food back to its source will help government agencies and companies to identify the source of a foodborne disease outbreak, coordinate more effective recalls of foods thought to be contaminated, and learn where past problems began. We think these steps will strengthen future prevention efforts and better protect the public's health from the threat of foodborne illness." - Robert Tauxe, MD, director of CDC’s Division of Foodborne, Waterborne, and Environmental Diseases