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Food Traceability on Blockchain: Walmart’s Pork and Mango Pilots with IBM

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In response to food contamination scandals worldwide, retail giant Walmart is tackling food safety in the supply chain using blockchain technology. In 2016, it established the Walmart Food Safety Collaboration Center in Beijing and plans to invest $25 million over five years to research global food safety (Yiannas and Liu, 2017). Using IBM’s blockchain solution based on Hyperledger Fabric, Walmart has successfully completed two blockchain pilots: pork in China and mangoes in the Americas (IBM, 2017). With a farm-to-table approach, Walmart’s blockchain solution reduced time for tracking mango origins from seven days to 2.2 seconds and promoted greater transparency across Walmart’s food supply chain (Yiannas, 2017). IBM called it “complete end-to-end traceability” (McDermott, 2017). The case highlights the challenges of implementing blockchain technology in the food supply chain and the opportunities for deploying blockchain solutions throughout the global food ecosystem to increase safety and reduce waste.
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... The adoption of Blockchain technology in FSCs is exemplified by IBM's food tracking platform and Walmart's successful Blockchain pilot for pork supply in China [18]. The momentum for integrating Blockchains into FSCs is growing, with examples such as Albertsons joining the IBM Food Trust network in 2019, which already included major organizations like Walmart and Carrefour [19]. ...
... In October 2016, Walmart and IBM collaborated on a Blockchain technology proof of concept to trace mangoes through the supply chain [18]. This study demonstrated the efficiency of Blockchain in quickly and accurately tracking food from the farm to the store. ...
... The proof of concept revealed specific insights, such as mangoes spending an extra four days at border control, which could be saved to extend shelf life, enhance product quality, and reduce food waste. Blockchain identified the supply chain inefficiencies, leading to a proactive "fact-finding" approach to addressing issues and ultimately resulting in be er quality products and less food waste [18]. ...
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... IBM Blockchain is one of the most popular platforms for supply chain solutions. One such instance is Walmart's pork and mango supply chain with IBM [13]. In healthcare, Blockchain improves the security and effectiveness of interchanging health information. ...
... Sadri et al. [117] proposed a cold chain for ensuring blood quality in transferring. One real-time application of blockchain in the supply chain is IBM-based Walmart's food supply chain [13]. Some of the supply chain frameworks with blockchain are discussed in 2. Blockchain alone cannot fulfill the supply chain management process. ...
... To achieve this, cold goods supply chains require more blockchain integration, like IoT's for regular temperature access and ML for predicting possible malfunctions in refrigerators or other equipment, enabling maintenance to be done in advance of a breakdown. By considering this, blockchain-based supply chains need to be [13] IBM blockchain for Walmart food supply chain. Used for pork and mango distribution from form to market. ...
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... The secure and unchangeable nature of blockchain records builds trust among stakeholders, as they can be confident that the data is accurate and has not been manipulated (Tian, 2016). This level of trust is particularly important in industries where product authenticity and traceability are critical, such as pharmaceuticals, food, and luxury goods (Kamath, 2018). ...
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... Walmart collaborated with IBM to implement the Food Trust blockchain platform, which allows for end-to-end traceability of food products. In one test, Walmart was able to trace the origin of a package of mangoes in 2.2 s, a process that previously took nearly 7 days [121]. Feng et al. [9] reviewed the development methods, benefits, and challenges of applying blockchain technology to improve agri-food traceability. ...
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... Jak podkreśla Brzeziński [2020], zarządzający systemem zaopatrzeniowym dostrzegają w tej technologii znaczący krok ku redukcji kosztów, postęp w walce z przemytem czy oszustwami. Technologia ta sprzyja bardziej realnemu wdrażaniu zasad zrównoważonego rozwoju, zwiększa wydajność wysyłki, przejrzystość, śledzenie przesyłek lub towarów, pomaga eliminować problemy wynikające z niewłaściwego umieszczenia lub kradzieży towarów, powoduje szybsze przetwarzanie faktur i płatności [Kamath 2018]. Może pomóc w rozwiązywaniu problemów związanych z optymalizacją procesów logistycznych, w tym zaopatrzenia, zarządzania transportem, śledzenia, współpracy celnej i finansowania handlu. ...
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