According to the latest report by Bloomberg, the US retail giant Walmart is now considering to leverage the blockchain technology for its live food business. Vice President of Food Safety and Health – Frank Yiannas – made this announcement on Monday during the MIT Technology Review’s Business of Blockchain conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Yiannas said that using the blockchain technology, there will be able to drastically reduce the time for tracking the produce from six days to two seconds. Walmart is also asking all of its suppliers to put the food on blockchain which will help them to reduce waste while at the same time improve contamination management and transparency.
Walmart has already started working on this project back in 2016 with technology giant IBM while identifying and removing all the recalled foods from its list. The decentralized nature of the blockchain technology helps the company to verify any information that is absolutely tamper-proof and secured.
Last month in March, Walmart patented a “Smart Package” system that uses blockchain-based tools in order to track package contents, location, environmental conditions and other things. The patent applications mention that this device is intended for use in unmanned drones and autonomous vehicles.
A leading number of online e-commerce companies are now using the Blockchain technology for quality assurance purposes. For e.g. China’s leading e-commerce website JD.com is also using the blockchain technology to assure the quality of meat.