Walmart’s Chinese branch has started an innovative way to address safety concerns when it comes to food in China-a blockchain platform.
Walmart’s Chinese branch has started an innovative way to address safety concerns when it comes to food in China-a blockchain platform.
The press release published by the company states that by the end of 2020 the company wants to have 50 percent of all the sales made in that category to be fully tracked by its platform.
On Tuesday, the Chinese branch of the company published a statement outlining how they’re going to join up with the blockchain project VeChain, PwC, and a few others as the next in the firm’s many projects addressing the tracking of food.
Walmart China’s new Blockchain Traceability Platform contains 23 tested product lines on it. VeChain has said that in addition to these listings, a further 100 will be applied until the end of this year. This movement will cover 10 product categories, such as fresh meat, rice, and others.
The press release published by the company states that by the end of 2020 the company wants to have 50 percent of all the sales made in that category to be fully tracked by its platform. In addition to this, the tracking of products via blockchain technology will compose over 40% of all of their vegetable sales, in addition to 12.5% of seafood.
Walmart China will let Chinese customers get detailed information on the products by scanning them with their smartphone. Information such as the location and source of the product will become publicly available knowledge, as well as its inspection reports and travel to the supermarket.
PwC’s strategy and innovation leader in the Mainland as well as Hong Kong, Elton Yeung, published the following statement:
“We believe that Walmart’s Blockchain Traceability System will be an excellent example of blockchain technology applied in the retail industry, helping to improve food safety and quality management, and providing a strong guarantee for building consumer trust.”
A piece of information worthy of note is that Walmart is now utilizing a vast variety of different blockchain based technologies in its track-and-trace projects, applying it to a wide range of their products.
Products in Walmart China will get tracked through the VeChainThor blockchain, which implies that Walmart is actually exploring using a public blockchain.
Walmart also founded Food Trust together with IBM, which is a permissioned platform running on Hyperledger Fabric. The firm also participates in two FDA approved pharmaceutical tracking pilots. The first of which is with Mediledger using the Parity chain, and the second is on Fabric.
Today, it’s almost VeChain’s one year anniversary, the business's goal is to put real business applications into a public blockchain. It attempts to do this by using a kind of permissioned consensus titled proof-of-authority, it is an alternative mechanism to other methods like proof-of-work mining that Bitcoin uses, or proof-of-stake.
In the future, Walmart’s planning to synchronize its data with those from local traceability platforms as well as their suppliers.
All of this is due to China’s recent food safety scandals, which have ranged from melamine-laden baby milk to pork that had glow-in-the-dark properties.
“VeChain will work with Walmart China to actively take heed of the call of the government, by utilizing technology to promote the traceability of fresh food, and to provide innovative solutions for the traceability platform through digital technology, so as to generate more transparent and reassuring consumption experience,” announced the COO of VeChain, Kevin Feng.
