Second-biggest supermarket company joins IBM Food Trust blockchain

The world’s second-biggest supermarket chain by sales has joined IBM’s food blockchain project. Albertsons Companies has 2300 stores across the United States and did 57 billion dollars in sales in 2017. The company will use IBM’s Food Trust blockchain to track and trace food between retail and suppliers.

IBM took its Food Trust blockchain program into live production in October last year. The system is able to locate a dodgy badge of products Thanks to the system only certain boxes in certain can be removed when needed, instead of an entire product line across an entire state. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about beef, spinach or dog food.

Albertsons joins European food giant Carrefour, Walmart, Nestle, Unilever and others in IBM’s project. So far, over half a million traces have been performed. Each trace represents a single lot, even though the amount of items per lot can vary depending on the product and company.

Walmart issued a mandate last year to its suppliers of leafy greens, stating that they had to be on the blockchain by the end of September 2019. Failing to do so, would mean that Walmart would terminate the contract. Albertsons is considering to take a similar position, and that’s only good news to consumers. Suppliers will need to be more careful, because mistakes in their production can lead right back to them.

Originally published at NEDEROB.