From Cow To Cash Register; The Need For Blockchain In The Food Industry

By Jan Scheele on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

A delicious cup of fresh orange juice, milk or coffee; daily drinks for a large part of our world population. They have become so commonplace that I often consume them without thinking where they came from. Why would food producers and supermarket chains actually make the effort to put the entire “supply chain” of daily consumed products, from cow to cash register on the blockchain and map it for consumers? Dutch retailer Albert Heijn did this as a test with their orange juice, Dutch spice trader Verstegen with their spices and Dutch slave-free producer of chocolate Tony Chocolony with their chocolate. Foreign supermarkets like Carrefour and Walmart have recently placed hundreds of products on the blockchain and are already achieving various positive results because of this, like increasing turnovers. Last week I was in China for the bi-annual meeting of the World Economic Forum where, among other things, we looked at the “why” of food on the blockchain.

In the Netherlands we are spoiled with good quality supermarkets with good products, whether you do your daily shopping at the cheap German discounter Aldi or luxury shop Albert Heijn, the quality of the products is good. This is totally different when looking in other continents. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 600 million people became ill over the past year, due to food poisoning and nearly 500,000 even died from it. Besides contaminated food, we as consumers also increasingly have to deal with “fake” food. In the Netherlands, we can probably still remember the ‘horse steaks’ and the revelations that still regularly take place about Dutch supermarkets and food producers, who do not put the promised ingredients in their products. This is also a worldwide known phenomenon; research has shown that 70% of the “Italian Extra Virgin” olive oil is actually not, that labels of Chiquita bananas are being falsified on a large scale and that the Subway chicken consists of only 50% chicken meat. In China alone, more than half a million security breaches were discovered and even counterfeit eggs are made and sold on a large scale.

I was therefore not surprised that various studies show that consumers no longer trust food, its producers…