IBM has announced a growing adoption of its food supply chain network, IBM Food Trust.
The blockchain-based cloud network offers participating retailers, suppliers, growers and food industry providers with data from across the food ecosystem to enable greater traceability, transparency and efficiency.
The network is now generally available after 18 months in testing, during which millions of individual food products have been tracked by retailers and suppliers.
The ecosystem of network participants continues to grow, and today, leading global retailer Carrefour announced they will use the IBM Food Trust blockchain network to strengthen their food excellence actions.
Laurent Vallée, General Secretary of Carrefour, said: "Being a founding member of the IBM Food Trust platform is a great opportunity for Carrefour to accelerate and widen the integration of blockchain technology to our products in order to provide our clients with safe and undoubted traceability.
"This is a decisive step in the roll-out of Act for Food, our global program of concrete initiatives in favour of the food transition."
Using blockchain for trusted transactions, food can be quickly traced back to its source in as little as a few seconds instead of days or weeks.
Unlike traditional databases, the attributes of blockchain and the ability to permission data, enables network members to gain a new level of trusted information.
Transactions are endorsed by multiple parties, leading to an immutable single version of the truth.
Bridget van Kralingen, Senior Vice President, IBM Global Industries, Clients, Platforms and Blockchain, said: "The currency of trust today is transparency and achieving it in the area of food safety happens when responsibility is shared.
"That collaborative approach is how the members of IBM Food Trust have shown blockchain can strengthen transparency and drive meaningful enhancements to food traceability.
“Ultimately that provides business benefits for participants and a better and safer product for consumers."
The members of IBM Food Trust have helped build a powerful global business solution that is interoperable and built on open standards.
This is designed to enable organizations in the food industry to run their businesses more effectively and provide safer food at lower costs.
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