Ready To Rumble: IBM Launches Food Trust Blockchain For Commercial Use

• IBM yesterday announced that its blockchain-based food traceability platform is now live and commercially available to food retailers, wholesalers and suppliers.

• The IBM Food Trust platform will be offered as a ‘solution-as-a-service’ via its cloud platform.

• Walmart recently reported that it had adopted the IBM Food Trust platform and would require its suppliers to use the service by September 2019.

• According to the Forbes report, other food industry players have signed up too, including Carrefour, Topco, Wakefern, Beefchain, Smithfield, and Dennick Fruit Source, alongside existing participants Nestle, Kroger, Tyson Foods, and Unilever.

• The report goes on to discuss how the implementation overcame five major hurdles for deploying blockchain: building the ecosystem, creating the business model, implementing a governance structure with secure data and access rights, ensuring inter-operability of the blockchain with existing systems, and standardisation.

Comments

• I noted at the time of the Walmart announcement a few weeks ago that this was a rare example of the move to live production for a blockchain use case.

• The primary potential benefit should be to improve the industry’s ability to react more effectively in the event of food contamination.

• That should reduce the costs of reacting, and reduce the risk of revenue loss from regulatory overreaction (e.g. industry sources suggest it took 6 years for the US spinach industry to recover from the 2006 spinach contamination despite the narrow source of the contamination).

• Could this boost earnings for the food retail sector? It should be net positive, but its probably not meaningful enough alone to move earnings for a player like Walmart or Nestle.

What do you think?

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by Mr Crypto Lemon