Walmart, the US retail goliath, and one of its division Sam’s Club, which is a membership-only club, are searching for suppliers for leafy green to implement a farm-to-store tracking system that depends on the blockchain technology, as reported by Reuters.
The peer-to-peer tracking system depends on the DLT (distributed ledger technology) created by IBM, the computing giant. As per the report, the retail giant will need the suppliers to incorporate the blockchain technology into its system by September 2019.
Frank Yiannas, Vice President of Walmart’s Food Safety department, said that the company will need the same traceability framework for several other vegetables and fresh fruit suppliers in the next one year. Walmart shared with Bloomberg that around 100 companies will be needed to incorporate the blockchain service of the computing giant.
Walmart believes that incorporating blockchain technology will dramatically increase the efficiency. To test it, Frank Yiannas organized an experiment of tracking with sliced mangoes and asked the team to trace that sliced mango back to the farm. The test took 7 days to complete it successfully. But with the implementation of blockchain technology, the traceability process will be done effectively and efficiently in 2.2 seconds.
As per Reuters, the CDC of the United States asked Walmart to improve the product tracking procedure to assist health officials trace and manage the outbreak of illnesses due to food. Earlier this year, 5 people were reported dead and dozens hospitalized due to an E. coli virus outbreak.
Recently, the retail giant has filed patents for some of the various blockchain applications, which has a process of managing smart appliances, enhancing secured deliveries, a healthcare data system and more. It was in June when Walmart and other 9 organizations collaborated with IBM to deploy a framework for food tracking, which is based on blockchain technology via its worldwide supply chain.