Five people in the U.K. died this week after eating sandwiches contaminated with listeria, a dangerous bacterial infection. Three weeks after the outbreak, the infected sandwiches are off the shelves, but the manufacturer, Good Food Chain, said in a statement Friday that the underlying cause is “still unclear.”
Hardly surprising: top players in the food industry tell Decrypt that most companies don’t have the software to handle food traceability issues. “Many large companies still rely on paper, pencils, spreadsheets, and whiteboards,” says Sean O’Leary, the CEO of a food-traceability software company, FoodLogiQ.
That’s a real issue for the industry. A recent PWC study estimated that food fraud costs the industry up to $40 billion annually. And in the U.S. alone, contaminated food leads to 48 million illnesses, 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths every year.
One solution? Blockchain’s immutable ledger, of course. Platforms like FoodLogiq, IBM Food Trust, ripe.io and TE-FOOD have experimented with blockchain systems that record every bushel, seed and nut grown, ensuring that only the finest ingredients reach your plate.
The garbage in, garbage out problem
TE-FOOD is starting to use blockchain to process over 18,000 pigs and 200,000 chickens every day. Many of its clients are in Vietnam, where fraud is possible at every step in the supply chain. Farmers might falsify vaccination certificates, animals might be pumped full of water and sedatives on the way to the slaughterhouse, and customers might pay extra money for beef marketed as premium Australian beef, when it’s actually cheap Cambodian beef. Tag the cows on the block, however, and they can tell the true story about your food within seconds.
Blockchain can’t solve the “garbage in, garbage out’ problem”; if useless information is stored on the blockchain, then the story that blockchain tells is worthless. But in combination with other technologies, like IOT sensors or fraud detection algorithms, blockchain could make the whole story fit together.
The result? Lower food wastage and increased food safety. With conventional food outbreaks, authorities try and trace the contaminated product down the food supply chain. “As you get further back down the supply chain, the geographical area becomes larger and larger, as these guys don’t know where the product came from,” says Stuart Bashford, Digital Officer at Bühler Group, which is responsible for providing food for approximately 2 billion people each year, and has partnered with Microsoft to develop blockchain solutions for its produce. With blockchain, Bashford says this process could be cut down to “seconds, rather than weeks”.