September 25, 2018

Lately, food safety has been in the public eye: 2018 has already seen a large outbreak of E. coli in romaine lettuce and Salmonella in a number of products from eggs to breakfast cereal.

Walmart and Sam’s Club sent a letter to suppliers of fresh, leafy greens asking them to trace their products all the way back to the farm using blockchain technology. Suppliers are expected to have all these systems in place by this time next year.

This change means that the information gathered by these suppliers will be open and accessible through technology that offers real-time, end-to-end traceability from farm to table. Blockchain allows for digitized sharing of data in a secure and trusted way.

What happens when the food you buy has been identified as having Salmonella or E. coli? You may not know where or how your Caesar salad was affected. You just know you don’t want your family to get sick when eating it.

This year, many customers and grocers were forced to throw away large amounts of romaine lettuce when an E. coli contamination in romaine lettuce spread through the food industry. Health officials at the Centers for Disease Control told Americans to avoid eating lettuce that was grown in Yuma, AZ.

“But it was difficult for consumers to know how to determine where their lettuce was grown,” said Frank Yiannas, vice president of food safety at Walmart.

“None of the bags of salad had ‘Yuma, Arizona’ on them,” he said. “In the future, using the technology we’re requiring, a customer could potentially scan a bag of salad and know with certainty where it came from.”

It’s crucial to respond quickly and accurately to food-safety issues like these. But with the traditional paper-based method of capturing information that exists at many farms, packing houses and warehouses, tracking down important data from multiple sources is extremely time-consuming.

With paper-based ledgers, Yiannas mentioned that it may take his team seven days to track down where a product came from. The team has to contact the supplier, get paper records and use those records to contact the company that imported or shipped the product to Walmart’s distribution center.

“The food system is absolutely too large for any single entity to [track],” Yiannas said.

But blockchain changes everything.

“We’ve been working with IBM to digitize that, so the information is captured on the farm with a handheld system. It’s [also] captured at the packing house at the supplier,” Yiannas continued.

Now, Walmart plans to use the power of blockchain to speed up identifying, researching and reacting to food safety situations.

Instead of taking a week to hunt down information about potential Salmonella in a product, blockchain tracking takes only a couple of seconds.

The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention believes that this change will help make more effective recalls.

“Customers trust us to help them put quality food on their tables for themselves and their families,” said Charles Redfield, executive vice president of food for Walmart U.S. “We have to go further than offering great food at an everyday low price. Our customers need to know they can trust us to help ensure that food is safe. These new requirements will help us do just that.”

Making information available in the interest of public safety is a step change for the industry. But it matters to everyone.

“When it comes to safety, this is not a competitive issue,” Yiannas said. “We all win or lose together.”