Bringing The Future To life In Abu Dhabi

Amid the deserts of Abu Dhabi, a new wave of entrepreneurs and innovators are sowing the seeds of a more sustainable future.

Image from: Wired

A cluster of shipping containers in a city centre is about the last place you’d expect to find salad growing. Yet for the past year, vertical farming startup Madar Farms has been using this site in Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, to grow leafy green vegetables using 95 per cent less water than traditional agriculture. 

Madar Farms is one of a number of agtech startups benefitting from a package of incentives from the Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO) aimed at spurring the development of innovative solutions for sustainable desert farming. The partnership is part of ADIO’s $545 million Innovation Programme dedicated to supporting companies in high-growth areas.

“Abu Dhabi is pressing ahead with our mission to ‘turn the desert green’,” explained H.E. Dr. Tariq Bin Hendi, Director General of ADIO, in November 2020. “We have created an environment where innovative ideas can flourish and the companies we partnered with earlier this year are already propelling the growth of Abu Dhabi’s 24,000 farms.”

The pandemic has made food supply a critical concern across the entire world, combined with the effects of population growth and climate change, which are stretching the capacity of less efficient traditional farming methods. Abu Dhabi’s pioneering efforts to drive agricultural innovation have been gathering pace and look set to produce cutting-edge solutions addressing food security challenges.

Beyond work supporting the application of novel agricultural technologies, Abu Dhabi is also investing in foundational research and development to tackle this growing problem. 

In December, the emirate’s recently created Advanced Technology Research Council [ATRC], responsible for defining Abu Dhabi’s R&D strategy and establishing the emirate and the wider UAE as a desired home for advanced technology talent, announced a four-year competition with a $15 million prize for food security research. Launched through ATRC’s project management arm, ASPIRE, in partnership with the XPRIZE Foundation, the award will support the development of environmentally-friendly protein alternatives with the aim to "feed the next billion".

Image from: Madar Farms

Global Challenges, Local Solutions

Food security is far from the only global challenge on the emirate’s R&D menu. In November 2020, the ATRC announced the launch of the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), created to support applied research on the key priorities of quantum research, autonomous robotics, cryptography, advanced materials, digital security, directed energy and secure systems.

“The technologies under development at TII are not randomly selected,” explains the centre’s secretary general Faisal Al Bannai. “This research will complement fields that are of national importance. Quantum technologies and cryptography are crucial for protecting critical infrastructure, for example, while directed energy research has use-cases in healthcare. But beyond this, the technologies and research of TII will have global impact.”

Future research directions will be developed by the ATRC’s ASPIRE pillar, in collaboration with stakeholders from across a diverse range of industry sectors.

“ASPIRE defines the problem, sets milestones, and monitors the progress of the projects,” Al Bannai says. “It will also make impactful decisions related to the selection of research partners and the allocation of funding, to ensure that their R&D priorities align with Abu Dhabi and the UAE's broader development goals.”

Image from: Agritecture

Nurturing Next-Generation Talent

To address these challenges, ATRC’s first initiative is a talent development programme, NexTech, which has begun the recruitment of 125 local researchers, who will work across 31 projects in collaboration with 23 world-leading research centres.

Alongside universities and research institutes from across the US, the UK, Europe and South America, these partners include Abu Dhabi’s own Khalifa University, and Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, the world’s first graduate-level institute focused on artificial intelligence. 

“Our aim is to up skill the researchers by allowing them to work across various disciplines in collaboration with world-renowned experts,” Al Bannai says. 

Beyond academic collaborators, TII is also working with a number of industry partners, such as hyperloop technology company, Virgin Hyperloop. Such industry collaborations, Al Bannai points out, are essential to ensuring that TII research directly tackles relevant problems and has a smooth path to commercial impact in order to fuel job creation across the UAE.

“By engaging with top global talent, universities and research institutions and industry players, TII connects an intellectual community,” he says. “This reinforces Abu Dhabi and the UAE’s status as a global hub for innovation and contributes to the broader development of the knowledge-based economy.”

Is AppHarvest the Future of Farming?

Special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, are red-hot right now, with investors clamoring to get into promising young companies.

In this video from Motley Fool Live, recorded on Jan. 28, Industry Focus host Nick Sciple and Motley Fool contributor Lou Whiteman discuss AppHarvest, one such SPAC that is looking to disrupt the agriculture industry. Here are the details on what AppHarvest wants to do, and a look at whether the company represents the future of farming.

Nick Sciple: One last company I wanted to talk about, Lou, and this is one I think it's -- you pay attention to, but not one I'm super excited to run in and buy. It was a company called AppHarvest. It's coming public via a [SPAC] this year. This vertical farming space. We talked about Gladstone Land buying traditional farmland. AppHarvest is taking a very different approach, trying to lean into some of the ESG-type movements.

Lou Whiteman: Yeah. Let's look at this. It probably wouldn't surprise you that the U.S. is the biggest global farm exporter as we said, but it might surprise you that the Netherlands, the tiny little country, is No. 2. The way they do that is tech: Greenhouse farm structure. AppHarvest has taken that model and brought it to the U.S. They have, I believe, three farms in Appalachia. The pitches can produce 30x the yields using 90% less water. Right now, it's mostly tomatoes and it is early-stage. I don't own this stock either. I love this idea. There's some reasons that I'm not buying in right now that we can get into. But this is fascinating to me. We talked about making the world a better place. This is the company that we need to be successful to make the world a better place. The warning on it is that it is a SPAC. So it's not public yet. Right now, I believe N-O-V-S. That deal should close soon. [Editor's note: The deal has since closed.] I'm not the only one excited about it. I tend not to like to buy IPOs and new companies anyway. I think the caution around buying into the excitement applies here. There is a Martha Stewart video on their website talking up the company, which I love Martha Stewart, but that's a hype level that makes me want to just watch and see what they produce. This is just three little farms in Appalachia right now and a great idea. This was all over my watchlist. I would imagine I would love to hold it at some point, but just be careful because this is, as we saw SPACs last year in other areas, people are very excited about this.

Sciple: Yeah. I think, like we've said, for a lot of these companies, the prospects are great. I think when you look at the reduced water usage, better, environmentally friendly, all those sorts of things. I like that they are in Appalachia. As someone who is from the South, I like it when more rural areas get some people actually investing money there. But again, there's a lot of execution between now and really getting to a place where this is the future of farming and they're going to reach scale and all those sorts of things. But this is a company I'm definitely going to have my radar on and pay attention to as they continue to report earnings. Because you can tell yourself a story about how this type of vertical farming, indoor farming disrupts this traditional model, can be more efficient, cleaner, etc. Something to continue paying attention to as we have more information, because this company, like you said, Lou, isn't all the way public yet. We still got to have this SPAC deal finalized and then we get all our fun SEC filings and quarterly calls and all those sorts of things. Once we have that, I will be very much looking forward to seeing what the company has to say.

Whiteman: Right. Just to finish up along too, the interesting thing here is that it is a proven concept because it has worked elsewhere. The downside of that is that it needed to work there. Netherlands just doesn't have -- and this is an expensive proposition to get started, to get going. There's potential there, but in a country blessed with almost seemingly unlimited farmland for now, for long term it makes sense. But in the short term, it could be a hard thing to really get up and running. I think you're right, just one to watch.

Vertical Farming, Blockchain And The Circular Economy Are Bringing ‘Farm to Table’ Into The 21st Century

by Rachael Brown

April 8, 2019

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Your groceries are getting a 21st-century reboot thanks to a new research centre focused on the future of food.

Australia’s population is forecast to hit 30 million by 2029 and reach almost 50 million – double the current population – by 2066. That’s a lot of mouths to feed, and with most of this growth concentrated in cities, the question needs to be asked: how can food production keep pace?

A new Future Food Systems Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) has received funding to the tune of $35 million to help answer that question over the course of the next decade.

The new CRC will focus on advanced food manufacturing, as well as how the sector can be more sustainable as Australia’s population continues to grow.

A cornucopia of challenges

Modern food production faces problems on many fronts. Growing populations demand increased output. Meanwhile, fewer people are choosing a life on the land, and climate change will create obstacles, some of which are hard to predict.

Minister for Industry, Science and Technology Karen Andrews said the new Future Food Systems CRC is designed to help Australia stay on the front foot in this area by bringing industry and research together.

“What we have to do is make sure we are looking towards the future and we’re clear what the issues are that we need to address,” she said at the launch event at UNSW.

These challenges include boosting the productivity of regional and peri-urban food systems, making it easier for innovators to bring their prototypes to market, and managing farm-to-table supply chains with extreme accuracy.

The CRC will initially work with regional stakeholders in six ‘food hubs’ to apply the latest innovations in advanced manufacturing, logistics and food science to farms, greenhouse complexes, factories and freight.

Besides putting food on local tables, streamlining food systems and making them more sustainable would place Australia in a good position to become the breadbasket of Asia.

“If I look at food in particular, we have almost half of the world’s population directly north of us … Australia is ideally located to play a key role in this area,” Andrews said.

Agriculture 2.0

This investment comes with opportunities for engineers who are interested in the intersection of food and technology. From genetic engineering to robotics, there are myriad forms this research can take. UNSW Engineering Dean Professor Mark Hoffman said this will be achieved through partnerships between engineers, technologists and primary producers.

“This CRC will move Australia into a new era of high-technology food production, transforming one of our most important industries and reinforcing our place as a major world food producer,” Hoffman said.

Plans are already in place for developing high-tech agrifood precincts in Liverpool, NSW, and Peel, WA. The Liverpool precinct will be developed in parallel with the new Aerotropolis in western Sydney. Developing these precincts includes providing design and circular economy solutions for water and energy use.

The Future Food Systems CRC website states it will partner with major growers and technology entrepreneurs to develop indoor and vertical farming facilities to increase the amount of food production taking place near existing infrastructure. Developing indoor urban agriculture could be worth up to $395 billion globally by 2030, according to a Food Innovation Australia report.

Circular economy solutions like water recycling, renewable energy and water management will facilitate this. Blockchain platforms and automation will also make an appearance as the CRC works with freight and logistics providers to get goods from A to B.

Queensland University of Technology’s Professor Doug Baker, who is also involved in the project, said there needs to be more integration between planning policy, design and infrastructure, and high-tech growing facilities around transport hubs.

“It’s about being smarter with agriculture and infrastructure, and integrating technology and robotics into that,” he said.

He said an example of a well-integrated future food system was automated, vertical-farming greenhouses located near airports or ports so crops could be picked, packed and shipped with minimal fuss.

Dr Chris Lehnert, a robotics researcher at the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision, sees enormous potential for robotics and automation in future food systems, particularly indoor protected cropping.

“The future potential of robotics in indoor protected cropping will be their ability to intelligently sense, think and act in order to reduce production costs and maximise output value in terms of crop yield and quality,” he said.

To further build this capability, the CRC will support 60 PhD students and train future generations interested in using technology to create more sustainable food production systems.

This funding, which will be doled out over the next decade, is on top of $149.6 million the CRC has previously received from more than 60 industry partners interested in this work.

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Rachael Brown

Rachael is the digital editor for create. She loves having a job that lets her go down rabbit holes, ask interesting people (hopefully) interesting questions, and indulge her need to know why things are they way they are and how they got that way.

Tags: AGRICULTURE AGTECH AUTOMATION CIRCULAR ECONO MYFOOD ENGINEERING MANUFACTURING RESOURCE MANAGEMENT ROBOTICS SUPPLY CHAINS SUSTAINABILITY SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS

Second Greenhouse Heated by Cryptocurrency Mining

Miami-based United American Corp announces the completion of its second BlockchainDome and the full commissioning of 1,500 additional miners for a total of 2,500 miners (3.8 megawatts) now in service in two BlockchainDomes. Pre-installation of 1.5 megawatts of electrical service for adjacent greenhouses heated by the BlockchainDomes is now also complete.

The latest BlockchainDome incorporates a number of improvements in construction and deployment from the first dome which includes mass pre-fabrication of a number of dome components and in-house CNC manufacturing of the mining rig docking stations. Construction logistics have also been refined to include pre-installation of foundations and utilities for future domes resulting in overall lower construction costs and shorter construction timelines.

"We have taken everything we have learned from the construction of the first BlockchainDome and used this knowledge to make the implementation of this subsequent BlockchainDomes faster, cheaper and of better quality," stated UnitedCorp CEO Benoit Laliberte. "Along with the generation of heat from the BlockchainDomes for agricultural purposes, our goal remains to be the low cost and environmentally sustainable standard for the industry."

UnitedCorp's technology uses the heat from cryptocurrency mining to support greenhouse agricultural operations through the BlockchainDome Heat Station system which keeps greenhouses at 20oC year-round. This represents a simple design solution compared to various alternatives whereby the cost of generating this heat from a single source is shared between multiple use cases.

Commercial greenhouses in cooler climates like in the Province of Quebec typically require a significant amount of thermal energy to supplement daytime solar energy, particularly during the period of September to May, and many older greenhouses utilize inefficient heating systems for this purpose. The dry heat produced by the BlockchainDome Heat Station is also used in the summer to reduce greenhouse mold and fungus caused by condensation thereby reducing or eliminating the need for chemicals to treat this problem and creating a more organic growth environment.

UnitedCorp believes this "Heat Campus" approach for heat generation and utilization is the future for agriculture and any other industry that can make use of low-cost heat with the ultimate goal being to get as close zero waste as possible. This is not only good economically but allows businesses to "green" their operations by significantly reducing the amount of electricity the combined operations require from the grid.

For more information:
UnitedCorp
5201 Blue Lagoon Drive, 8th floor,
Miami FL 33126 
www.unitedcorp.com

WALMART The World’s Biggest Retailer Wants To Bring Blockchains To The Food Business

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WALMART The World’s Biggest Retailer Wants To Bring Blockchains To The Food Business

By Joon Ian Wong | Illustrations by Justine Shirin

Quartz Media, LLC

Beijing, China

I’m at Walmart’s global food safety collaboration center, housed in a nondescript office tower downtown, on a rainy Beijing summer day. I meet with Frank Yiannas, VP of food safety at Walmart. He’s fresh off a flight from Bentonville, Arkansas—Walmart’s headquarters—and is in Beijing for a quarterly meeting of the board that oversees the center. He’s keen to underline China’s importance in the world’s future food supply landscape. “It’s such an important and expanding economy in the global 21st-century food system,” he says. “The 21st-century food system—China will play a huge role in it.”

And Yiannas is right. Chinese take their food safety seriously. After dozens of scares involving “fake” food—from eggs to infant formula—Chinese consumers place a premium on food products that come from what are perceived to be trusted sources. That’s why there’s a roaring trade in baby milk powder, from Hong Kong and Australia, on the mainland. It’s so big that the Chinese government changed tax rules in 2016 to clamp down on the grey market for imported baby milk formula.

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That’s partly why Yiannas chose to launch Walmart’s blockchain ambitions in Beijing, with a pilot project that tracked packages of pork—China’s most popular meat—from farm to supermarket shelf. The pilot was successful enough to trigger a second trial, this time with mangoes in central America, which was successful as well.

We’re talking in the food safety collaboration center. Instead of a lab filled with scientists testing meat or vegetables for toxins, it’s really just a series of meeting rooms, much like any co-working space across the Chinese capital. “We certainly could have built a lab,” Yiannas tells me, but Walmart was less interested in using the center to focus on the science of food safety, and more on the links in the chain that get food from place to place. “Some companies will do food-safety work in a silo,” he says. “We reach out to the suppliers, the consumer groups.”

The Beijing center, the first of its kind for Walmart, opened in 2016. The retail giant committed $25 million over five years to the facility after a number of food safety scandals—from mislabeling of organic pork to selling expired duck meat—plagued the country. Walmart’s goal is to convene the world’s food safety experts to figure out ways to track the provenance of a package of food—be it mangoes or pork ribs—with new techniques and systems.

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Walmart’s blockchain project could fundamentally alter the way information is secured, stored, and shared across the food and retail industry.

One of Walmart’s grandest projects is an attempt to graft a blockchain, that immutable cryptographic ledger first used by bitcoin, onto the world’s complex food supply chains. Walmart has roped in some of the industry’s biggest players, among them fruit producer Dole, consumer goods giant Unilever, and Swiss water and food conglomerate Nestle, to form a consortium of 10 food producers and retailers to make it a reality. They’re building the technology with IBM, which has been among the most active technology firms pushing blockchain solutions to corporate technology departments. If Walmart is successful, the project could fundamentally alter the way information is secured, stored, and shared across the food and retail industry, ushering in an era where an item of produce can be tracked in real-time from farm to table, by producers and consumers.

THE PROBLEM WITH SUPPLY CHAINS

To hear logistics experts describe the links of warehouses, container ships, trucks, and cargo planes that deliver our food to us, it’s a wonder anything makes it onto our shelves at all. It’s a mess of phone calls, hand-written forms, and, yes, the much maligned fax machine. Retailers and food suppliers can spend millions of man-hours a year on food traceability, says Yiannas.

Food supply chains are complex affairs that have only become more intricate over the last decades. “The fundamental problem with supply chains is that information is captured in silos,” says Steve Rogers, an IBM supply chain expert. “The globalization of supply chains has just made that worse over the last 15 to 20 years.”

 Collaboration—or the lack of it—is the reason why current food safety systems take so long to trace a product’s provenance.

Collaboration—or the lack of it—is the reason why current food safety systems take so long to trace a product’s provenance. Yiannas describes a landscape for food safety systems that’s fragmented, with each producer or retailer using its own systems to track products. The problem begins when an item leaves one producer’s system and is entered into another’s, with no traceability between the two systems. “It’s very linear data capture. It’s siloed in Walmart’s system, or another retailer’s system, and there’s no connection,” he says. “With blockchain, it’s different. It’s fundamentally about networks.”

Rogers describes the complexities of even a basic food supply chain: “Think of a farm that may be selling to three or four different wholesale buyers. They may then be distributing to multiple different packagers, who eventually package it for different brands. And then another set of logistics is going on, and eventually it gets to a store.”

In January 2016, a listeria contamination caused at least one death and dozens of hospitalizations in the US. This came 10 years after an e. coli outbreak from contaminated spinach, which infected 199 people. The first cases of the e. coli outbreak were reported in mid-August, but it was only in early October that the Centers for Disease Control issued a warning. Rogers says greater supply-chain transparency would have tightened the “containment ring” and minimized infections. “When you don’t have the information, your containment ring becomes extremely large and costly. With knowledge, you can draw a much tighter containment ring and hopefully you can isolate it quickly,” he says.

Rogers and Yiannas are betting on blockchains to do this. But it didn’t come easy for these veterans of the logistics and food businesses. “I was a naysayer, I was so skeptical,” Yiannas says of the time IBM first gave a presentation about the technology to him. “I became a believer when I started to understand how blockchain worked,” he says. “It solves not only digitizing food information but it addresses the social issue of how that information is shared.”

 “Blockchain tech is designed to solve the problem of coordinating members of a group who don’t necessarily trust each other.”

The “collaboration” bit of Walmart’s food safety center in Beijing also goes some way to explaining why a blockchain is a good fit for it. Blockchain tech is designed to solve the problem of coordinating members of a group who don’t necessarily trust each other. In the case of bitcoin, it allows anonymous strangers to send digital money to one another while eliminating the possibility of one party cheating another by spending funds that they don’t have, for example. That principle has been seized on by other industries, from finance to shipping, as a way to solve coordination and issues of trust globally.

There are trials from the shipping line Maersk and work by Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com. The latter has a blockchain, live since May of 2017, tracking the delivery of frozen beef from the steppes of Inner Mongolia to supermarket shelves in China’s megacities of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. Fellow e-commerce giant Alibaba has announced plans to do something similar, but with beef products from Australia.

“Companies have been digitizing information on the supply chain for two decades,” he says. “That’s not new. What we didn’t believe—but what we saw—is that the fundamentals of how blockchain works are different.” He talked about the glut of horse meat fraudulently mixed into processed meat products across Europe in recent years. “[Blockchain] is like shining a light on each point of the food system that could deter those types of incidents.”

WHAT’S A BLOCKCHAIN, ANYWAY?

At this stage, some explanation of what exactly a blockchain is is in order. First of all, there is no single, monolithic blockchain. Different cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin or ethereum, have separate blockchains. When people refer to “the blockchain” they may be referring to the oldest and most popular one, which is the bitcoin blockchain, or using it as a generic term for blockchains in general.

In the case of a cryptocurrency like bitcoin, it might be helpful to think of a blockchain as a byproduct of bitcoin transactions. How does this happen? Each bitcoin transaction is recorded in a ledger—its blockchain—that is shared among all the computers that make up the bitcoin network globally. Bitcoin’s ledger is made up of chunks of data—blocks—that when strung together form a history of every transaction ever made by anyone with bitcoin. This string of blocks is bitcoin’s blockchain. (Here’s our in-depth explainer on how transactions are added, or mined, in bitcoin.)

How do you create a blockchain without the speculation and mania linked to bitcoin?

Since bitcoin was created nine years ago by the still-anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto as a tool to side-step banks and state-issued money, it has increasingly been embraced by the very institutions it was designed to disrupt. From Wall Street to the world’s biggest corporations, executives tasked with bringing innovation to their companies began talking about “blockchain technology” as an idea distinct from the cryptocurrencies that introduced it.

The idea is to reverse engineer a blockchain and extract the best features while leaving the rest behind for the anarchists and libertarians of the bitcoin world.The challenge is this: How do you create a blockchain without the speculation and mania linked to bitcoin? Instead of a blockchain being merely a record of bitcoin’s transactions, executives wanted a blockchain that could deal with existing, real-world assets to suit their own needs. That might be streamlining supply chains, automating banking back-room operations, or tracking diamonds.

MARRYING BLOCKCHAINS WITH SUPPLY CHAINS

The reason corporations think a blockchain could solve their supply chain problems can be summed up in one word: trust. It’s what blockchains were designed for—getting a bunch of counter-parties to agree on a set of transactions. That’s why bitcoin users, for example, can stay semi-anonymous.

In the same way, corporate blockchains would allow a vast network—from farmers to trucking companies to warehouse staff—to trust that a product has passed through a link in the chain and been processed in a particular way. Blockchains used by corporations are closed and can avoid the energy-intensive expense involved with “mining,” or doing the computing necessary to solve the cryptographic puzzle associated with bitcoin.

Blockchains for corporations have another critical property: greater privacy. While it may sound counterintuitive, corporations are even more sensitive over transaction data than, say, a dark web user who’s buying illicit drugs with bitcoin. When corporations first began to explore blockchain technology, they were keen to build in a layer of privacy over transaction data. That’s what consortia like R3, or the open-source Hyperledger project, have developed in the blockchain solutions they market to companies.

WHAT WALMART AND IBM ARE DOING

To understand what Walmart’s experiments with blockchain technology looked like, I went to IBM’s research lab in Zhongguancun, which has been called China’s Silicon Valley because of the sheer number of technology giants headquartered there. There, I met with the team of research scientists and executives who worked with Walmart to develop a blockchain solution based on the open-source Hyperledger codebase.

Jin Dong, the associate director at IBM Research who led the effort, walked me through the process of putting Walmart’s pork on a blockchain. Data about the pork product, from the farm inspection report to the livestock quarantine certificate, are digitized by an “industrial personal digital assistant,” which basically looks like a smartphone in a rugged case. It emits a laser to scan barcodes rapidly. These data are then uploaded in real-time to Walmart’s blockchain. The farm is operated by a company called Jin Luo, and this particular farm is located in Lingyi city in northeastern China.

 “The nature of blockchain ensures the data put into a blockchain can hardly be changed and can be stored forever.”

The other key link in this process are the drivers. They are charged with not only transporting the product but bringing along the necessary documentation for each batch of products. With the blockchain pilot, they were asked to take photographs of the various certificates as they transported them from place to place, where they would be stamped. This verified that the products were moving along the supply chain. “If someone is looking for specific documents, it takes a lot of time to locate them,” Dong said. Digitized documents stored on a blockchain and linked to a particular batch of products removes that pain point, he said.

As the pork products wend their way to a Walmart distribution center, and ultimately, the shelves of a Walmart store, they have passed through dozens of hands. But the blockchain pilot allowed the progress of each batch of products leaving the farm to be tracked, in real-time, across the country. Once the products reach individual stores, they are repackaged and distributed across the shop floor. The pilot doesn’t track individual retail packages, IBM said, although the level of detail in the data is sufficient to track a particular retail package back to the farm. Changrui Ren, an IBM Research executive who worked on the project said, “The nature of blockchain ensures the data put into a blockchain can hardly be changed and can be stored forever,” he said.

THE COMPLEXITIES OF SLICED MANGOES

After the Chinese pork pilot, Walmart ran a larger scale test tracking mangoes from Central America. “We picked mangoes because it was more complex,” Yiannas says. “It was sliced mangoes.” The fruit is grown by small farmers, transported to a “packing house” where they are washed, then moved across the US border. They are then stored in refrigerated warehouses, and eventually end up at a Walmart supplier where they are sliced and packaged. “You can see how many layers it takes to get those mangoes from farm to table,” he says.

 Current rules for food traceability require a retailer to be able to see one step forward and one step back in the chain.

Current rules for food traceability require a retailer to be able to see one step forward and one step back in the chain. That means Walmart would only be required to know which importer handled a particular package of mangoes, but wouldn’t necessarily know which packing house it came from, or which farm. “It’s almost impossible to have a clear view of where this food came from,” Yiannas says.

Yiannas decided to put his team, and the blockchain they had built, to the test. He bought a packet of sliced mangoes and brought it to the office. “I told them to trace it back to the farm,” he says. After numerous phone calls, faxes, and emails, the results were in—six days, 18 hours, and 26 minutes later. “Those records had to be pursued,” he says. He then did a live demonstration of the blockchain system in front of the media, tracing the same packet of sliced mangoes. “We put in the code, and we traced it back to the farm in 2.2 seconds,” he says. “So we’ve gone from seven days to 2.2 seconds. This isn’t a lab. This isn’t theory. This is the real world.”

Every second matters, Yiannis says, because in a real food contamination situation, it could mean the difference between many more sick consumers, and farmers being forced to stop supplying their produce for fear they were the source of the contamination. “Imagine if there was a food scare and you didn’t know where the contaminated mangoes came from,” he says. “Seven days is a long time.”

 “A blockchain solution is the foundation to creating a smarter food system for the future.”

Even the best blockchain architecture would be useless if producers and retailers couldn’t agree on how to use it. That’s why Yiannas pushed to create a consortium with other food companies—something that’s easier to do when you’re the world’s largest retailer by sales. “The blockchain solution we’re working on is the foundation to creating a smarter food system for the future,” he says. He envisions packing pallets with thermometers that transmit their cargo’s temperature instantly, and all that data stored on a blockchain can be accessed by customs officials, regulators, and consumers.

But in order for that data to be make any sense when it’s shared across silos, it has to be captured and formatted in standard ways. “Any companies working on [blockchain tech for food chains] need to base it on established standards,” he says. “Some new standards will need to be created, but I don’t think it will be that hard. The food industry has been working on this.”

SOME SKEPTICISM

Some industry observers think blockchain’s potential in logistics has been overhyped. Gartner’s Ray Valdes, who covers blockchain projects for the research firm, says that many supply chain projects could just as easily be executed on a traditional database. “Ninety percent of enterprise blockchain projects today don’t need a blockchain, and would be better off without one because they are not aligned with what blockchain can actually do,” he says. Valdes says he advises most clients against using a blockchain in their technology system. “If I can save them $1 million on a pointless blockchain project, that’s our value,” he says.

When it comes to supply chains, Valdes believes that blockchains could play an important coordinating role. “If you have a fragmented business ecosystem, with many parties who don’t know each other but need to do business, then they could collaborate through a blockchain,” he says. But there’s a catch. “It’s a ‘boil the ocean’ problem,” he says, meaning that it’ll take fundamental shifts in an industry for adoption to take place. Optimistically, he says, it would take a decade for the industry to rearrange itself so that everyone was logging interactions on a blockchain.

Valdes argues that a company as dominant as Walmart doesn’t need its suppliers on a blockchain. It can simply ask its vendors to use whatever system it chooses. “They have been very successful because over the years they have built a robust system of record for their supply chain,” he says. “If you were a supplier to them, you would happily accept their centralized version of the truth.”

But in Yiannas’ mind, blockchains solve the very thing that prevent databases from being built and shared between companies: trust. He told me about his quest for the perfect food traceability system. “I’ve looked at them all,” he says. “I’ve been in pursuit of the holy grail.”

Blockchains, because they are designed for collaboration, could change all that, and not just for the Walmarts, Unilevers, and IBMs of the world. “It’s a new way of democratizing how data is captured and shared,” Yiannas says. “It’s a game-changer in that it’s adding value to all the participants.” Yiannas puts blockchain tech on the same scale as cellphones when it comes to digital disruption. “Imagine a digitally transparent system connecting farmers and buyers,” he says. “One of the best things that has happened to farmers in small economies is just giving them a cellphone so they can connect with buyers.”

The unlikely factor aligning a Walmart food executive and a mango farmer in central America, then, may turn out to be an accounting device that was first given expression in a stateless cryptocurrency, but which may turn out to be critical in resolving one of the food industry’s most vexing problems.