In a country where there have been various food safety scandals starting with the melamine laden baby milk to gutter oil recycled for human consumption, the latter is a huge reminder and motivation to create systems to ensure food safety. In their quest to develop a blockchain based food safety platform, giant supermarket Walmart China has partnered with several other stakeholders to develop a platform based on blockchain technology. The latter will be hosted on VeChainThor blockchain.
While VeChain will spearhead the development of the food safety platform, on the other hand, Walmart China is on this walk with China Chain-Store & Franchise Association, Cattle Company Inner Mongolia Kerchin and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). Per the press release, the latter firm’s joint venture on food safety was unveiled during the 2019 China Products Safety Publicity Week Traceability System Construction Seminar in Beijing.
Primary Goal of Developing a Food Safety Platform
From the looks of things, the aim of creating the food safety platform is to ensure products on the market are of good quality and a fit for human consumption. Through the VeChainThor blockchain platform, Walmart China, together with other stakeholders, will have the upper hand since they can trace the movement of products right from the farm. Furthermore, consumers will also benefit from using the food safety platform since they can also scan the products bar code and get a detailed report about the products they are purchasing. Through their smartphones, consumers can track the route the products took to reach the supermarket, and also get details on the product’s geographical location and source of tracked products.
With the platform already having 23 products tested and online, Walmart China primary goal is to increase the number of product lines to 100 with products coming from 10 different categories by the end of this year. Some of the categories earmarked for addition are cooking oil, mushroom, rice, and fresh meat category. Furthermore, through Walmart China Blockchain Traceability Platform the supermarket hopes by the end of next year, fresh products tracked through the platform will account for 50 percent of total sales. Similarly, Walmart China hopes 12.5 percent of seafood and 40 percent of purchases will be generated from the blockchain platform by 2020. Besides the above Walmart also has several other projects running from the blockchain space.
