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Ten leading food companies, including Nestlé SA, Unilever, Dole, Kroger Co., and Walmart, have joined the IBM Food Trust to track food from farm to the grocery aisle, as detailed in a report by FoodLogiQ.
The initiative envisions a level of transparency that will reveal the exact whereabouts and cause of food illness outbreaks in a matter of minutes – not days or weeks. A distributed blockchain ledger that tracks the status of every food product in real-time lies at the heart of the system, according to FoodLogiQ. Frank Yiannas, the Walmart v.p. who oversees food safety, calls it “the equivalent of FedEx tracking for food.”
In a report published by the FoodNavigator, Yiannis said the process of moving food from the farm to table is not actually linear. “I try not to use the words food chain and instead use food system because we know that when you do these trace-backs, they are not straight back,” Yiannis told attendees at the Food & Nutrition Conference & Expo, in Washington, DC. The system is “chaotic and decentralized with producers regularly switching suppliers, and intermediaries, such as processors, constantly changing – making it difficult for one central player – such as Walmart – to digitally untangle and keep track of all the relationships in real time,” said Yiannas in the FoodNavigator report.
He views the adoption of blockchain ledgers as a mega trend that mirrors the decentralized and distributed multi-tasking nodes of today’s food system, which has replaced sequential transactions by specialized companies.
In practical terms, a country like Sri Lanka, which has vigorously debated recommendations by tea exporters to import tea from other origins for blending, could rely on blockchain ledgers to protect the reputation of its Ceylon Tea brand.
Plantation companies and smallholders fear that blending tea imported from Africa and India will dilute their national brand. Exporters meanwhile lament the loss of market share and lack of competitiveness due to higher prices and are seeking free trade zones offshore.
“With the closed-door economic regime prevailing for the tea export industry due to plantation sector fears of a fall in prices at the Colombo auctions, many tea exporters have looked at the option of relocating at least a part of their export business to liberal and business-friendly countries like UAE, Abu Dhabi, Oman, and India,” HVA Foods chairman Rohan Fernando told the Daily Mirror in Colombo.
Currently, 80% of Sri Lankan tea is sold in bulk, with 40% blended offshore.