The leading market players in the global food supply chain a collaboration with IBM on introducing blockchain, to maintain and win the confidence of customers in the global food system. The companies include Driscoll’s, Dole, Kroger, Golden State Foods, McLane Company, McCormick and Company, Nestle, Walmart, Unilever and Tyson Foods. These companies will work with IBM to discover new areas where the supply chain in the food industry can get benefits from blockchain.
The food companies and IBM will prioritize new areas where blockchain can be used and this will also result in multiple IBM production networks in the areas where blockchain can have a positive impact on the traceability of the global food industry. As per the press release by IBM, blockchain can help and address the challenges related to food traceability, establishing a trusted environment for all the transactions. All the participants including producers, processors, suppliers, distributors, retailers, consumers and regulators in the global food supply chain can gain safe access and information related to the origin and state of food for transactions. This helps the food providers and others in the food supply chain ecosystem to use blockchain to track contaminated product in a very short duration of time, ensuring safe removal from store shelves.
To speed up the process of adoption of blockchain in the food industry, IBM is also introducing integrated, enterprise-grade production blockchain platform and services to support organizations to activate business networks as fast as possible and access the capabilities to develop, operate, secure and govern these networks.
The newly developed platform touches a wide range of pain points including technical and business requirements related to performance, security, and privacy. The platform also allows multiple parties to develop, operate, govern, and secure blockchain networks. This will also accelerate the blockchain adoption.
IBM and Walmart in parallel trials in the U.S. and China demonstrated that blockchain can be used to track the every stage in the supply chain of the food product from farm till the product reaches the retailers. It was also shown that the stakeholders view food safety as the biggest issue throughout the food supply chain globally. Hence these stakeholders are willing to work together to tackle the food safety issue and improve the system.
IBM is providing a wide range of resources to meet the growing demand for skilled workforce. IBM is also working with various universities to host workshops and for the developing customized curricula.
