Food Traceability on Blockchain: Walmart’s Pork and Mango Pilots with IBM

By R. Kamath. The Journal of British Blockchain Association, 2018

409 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In response to food contamination scandals worldwide, retail giant Walmart is tackling food safety in the supply chain using blockchain technology. In 2016, it established the Walmart Food Safety Collaboration Center in Beijing and plans to invest $25 million over five years to research global food safety (Yiannas and Liu, 2017). Using IBM’s blockchain solution based on Hyperledger Fabric, Walmart has successfully completed two blockchain pilots: pork in China and mangoes in the Americas (IBM, 2017). With a farm-to-table approach, Walmart’s blockchain solution reduced time for tracking mango origins from seven days to 2.2 seconds and promoted greater transparency across Walmart’s food supply chain (Yiannas, 2017). IBM called it “complete end-to-end traceability” (McDermott, 2017). The case highlights the challenges of implementing blockchain technology in the food supply chain and the opportunities for deploying blockchain solutions throughout the global food ecosystem to increase safety and reduce waste.

Subfields: Food Science, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b1cd65230aac83803a398e2a288915854c3bf010

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Citations in the corpus

The Rise of Blockchain Technology in Agriculture and Food Supply Chains (2019, background): “…2018), Nestle (ITUNews 2018) Traceability Canned pumpkin Nestle (ITUNews 2018) Traceability Pork Walmart, Kroger, IBM (CB Insights 2017), (Kamath 2018) Traceability Sugar cane Coca-Cola (Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss, Reuters 2018) Supervision and Management Beer Downstream (Ireland Craft…”
Blockchain and the circular economy: potential tensions and critical reflections from practice (2020, methodology): “Collaborating with the IBM blockchain service, Walmart has been able to track their lettuce and pork as pilot programmes (Kamath 2018).”
Blockchain technology in agri-food value chain management: A synthesis of applications, challenges and future research directions (2019, methodology): “Then, a pork value chain traceability system combined with barcode has been built based on the mango blockchain solutions [13].”
Blockchain in global supply chains and cross border trade: a critical synthesis of the state-of-the-art, challenges and opportunities (2019, background): “In the second study, Walmart and IBM tracked several different pork products from a single supplier to local stores in China, in a joint effort with a Chinese online marketplace, JD.com (Kamath 2018).”
IoT, Big Data, and Artificial Intelligence in Agriculture and Food Industry (2020, neutral): “As an example during the Spinach outbreak of 2006, it took two weeks to isolate the contaminant and ample resources were expended [114].”
Blockchain-Based Soybean Traceability in Agricultural Supply Chain (2019, methodology): “Food Traceability Pilots by Walmart through IBM Hyperledger [31].”