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Walmart is Testing Out Using Blockchain to Track Food Through its Supply Chain

Accepted submission by Fnord666 at 2016-11-25 20:39:50
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Fnord666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

Walmart has teamed up with IBM, who offers blockchain as a service, in order to create a distributed ledger to track food throughout their supply chain [arstechnica.com]. Walmart hopes that with this ledger they can quickly track any issues such as contamination or spoilage and isolate the impacted product.

“It gives them an ability to have an accounting from origin to completion,” Marshal Cohen, an analyst at researcher NPD Group Inc., told Bloomberg. “If there’s an issue with an outbreak of E. coli, this gives them an ability to immediately find where it came from. That’s the difference between days and minutes.”

For a retailer such as Walmart, which serves 260 million customers a week, an efficient tracking system also means the difference between pulling a few affected shipments and needlessly tossing products from hundreds of stores as a precaution.

Original Submission