| Abstract: |
The food supply chain in China is about to get a safety boost. It’s set to come from a new Blockchain Food Safety Alliance kicking off with a collaboration between IBM Corp., major retailer Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Chinese e-commerce company JD.com Inc. and the Tsinghua University National Engineering Laboratory for E-Commerce Technologies. These efforts expand already existing pilot programs developed by IBM and Walmart that experimented with distributed ledger blockchain technology, which was used to track pork shipments in China and mangoes in the United States. Following IBM’s announcement in August, this development expands on the company’s consortium of retail chains working together to build a global food safety supply chain by bringing it into China. Recent testing by Walmart showed that the application of blockchain technology to supply chains reduced the time to trace a package of mangoes from the farm to the shelf from days or weeks to seconds. |
