JD.com, which is the Chinese retail giant, is joining the blockchain bandwagon with a solution that would track the supply chain of its meat sales, according to a Business Insider report.
The company is working with Australian beef producer HW Greenham & Sons Pty Ltd. on a service that would let customers monitor their meat from the farm where it was raised, all the way to their doorstep.
Expected to be operational this spring, the system will provide users with information on all sorts of verifiable details, including how the meat was raised, butchered, and transported.
It is not unknown that counterfeit goods “slip under the radar” in China. For instance, in August 2016, some 319 pigs were found to be contaminated by prohibited drugs, including salbutamol and clenbuterol. By allowing users to verify the origin of the meat in seconds, a blockchain-based solution could help increase customer confidence.
“Consumers in China don’t just want quality imported products, they want to know that they can trust how and where their food is sourced, and blockchain helps us deliver this peace of mind,” Chen Zhang, JD’s CTO said in a statement.
On the other hand, the same system would help food suppliers who can use it to track the origin of foodborne illnesses like salmonella. With that information, they would be able to quickly locate the source of the contaminated products and act accordingly.
Walmart is also working on a similar solution
On the other part of the planet, Walmart is also aiming to use blockchain to improve food safety. To that end, the company has partnered with IBM on a decentralized computing project that would identify and remove recalled foods from its products list.
Whereas Walmart’s current system requires days to search and discover the origin of a product, the one based on blockchain would work much faster, enabling Walmart and its partners to more easily verify and identify any information on any product on the ledger. More importantly, such system would be more secure with blockchain technology protecting the underlying data.
“With Blockchain, you can do strategic removals, and let consumers and companies have confidence. We believe that enhanced traceability is good for other aspects of the food systems,” Frank Yiannas, vice president of food safety at Walmart, said at the time when the deal with IBM was announced. “We hope you could capture other important attributes that would inform decisions around food flows, and even get more efficient at it.”
JD, Walmart, and IBM are all members of the Chinese Blockchain Food Safety Alliance.