Walmart and Blockchain Officially a Thing as Romaine E. Coli Scare Initiates Leafy Greens Tracking

Walmart Announces The Use Of Blockchain Technology To Track Leafy Greens

As food safety starts to be at the center of the public debate, Walmart has decided to take a stand and to start using the blockchain technology to solve issues in this area. The company has recently announced the initiative on Twitter.

In food safety, we all win or lose together. Today’s announcement means there will be more suppliers on #blockchain to help the food industry track food to its source more quickly. https://t.co/np55kVcIxg pic.twitter.com/bJrnXnnQcE

— Walmart Inc. (@WalmartInc) September 24, 2018

After 2018 has seen a large outbreak of E. Coli in romaine lettuce and Salmonela in many products that range from eggs to breakfast cereal, the company decided it was the time to take a stand for once and for all.

Walmart Asks Suppliers To Use Blockchain Tech on Leafy Greens

Walmart and the Sam’s Club sent a letter to their suppliers asking them to use the blockchain to start tracking theirs produces. This could be used to trace them back all the way to their farms using the blockchain. The idea is to enable the suppliers to do this within a year.

After they have done this, they may gather the information and let it be accessible for the customers in real time, which will offer unprecedented ways to track products when they go from the farm to the table.

If your food gets infected, you know how to deal with it, you should simply not buy it. In fact, even the owners of the stores can solve the problem by not selling them. If you know how the food was infected, though, it is even easier to track the problem, which is also an efficient way to deal with it.

With the use of this technology, the users will be able to scan their bags of salad and know where has it come from, which will make the whole process more transparent. This is crucial to develop the food standards that can make the food secure for people without having to use such a time-consuming method like tracking down the data.

Paper-based ledgers can make the whole process inefficient while using the blockchain will save in time and costs and even the clients will have easy access to the information because it will be decentralized.

When you consider that a simple lettuce is planted and harvested in a field, sent to the processing facility to be washed, sliced and bagged, transported, stored, moved, put on sale, sold and then used, you can see just how complex the whole process is and how time-consuming it would be to simply use paper.

How Does The Blockchain Help?

The blockchain has the potential to change everything. By working together with IBM, Walmart was able to create a technology that can track the products on a distributed ledger in real time.

As you may know, the blockchain technology is a system that it is used to keep records on permissioned ledgers that are immutable and, therefore, tamper-proof. This makes hard for companies to conceal their mistakes and risk the safety of the public.

The accuracy and trust of this technology can become something very important for the industry as it will give both the consumers and the stores the ability to react quickly to any kind of contamination and even stop these outbreaks more quickly than they have been able to do so far.

This way, the goal of Walmart is to build trust by using transparency to make the customers trust the company and its products. The solution is good for the company and for the clients alike because it helps everybody to be a part of a vibrant and important environment.