On Oct. 4, Indian business publication LiveMint reported that Walmart will use blockchain technology to track its Indian-sourced shrimp to select locations of Sam’s Club retail stores in the U.S.
United States retail giant Walmart, in collaboration with IBM, will use blockchain technology to track its shrimp supply chains.
Walmart worked with the Indian seafood processor Sandhya Aqua to add the shrimp supply chain to the blockchain-enabled IBM Food Trust platform so customers can track where their shrimp comes from.
This is reportedly the first time that blockchain technology will be used to track shrimp exports from the Indian farmer to an overseas retailer. President of the National Fisheries Institute John Connelly said:
“As one of the most traded commodities in the world, seafood has a complex and wide-reaching supply chain, which makes testing and further developing technology-assisted traceability programs an important step. It is encouraging to see a retail leader like Walmart participate in seafood blockchain testing.”
Shrimp is India’s largest agricultural export, with the U.S. representing its largest shrimp market, consuming 46% of India’s shrimp exports. LiveMint reports that the application blockchain technology will help Indian shrimp farmers meet strict U.S. food standards, thus gaining the trust of U.S. retailers and securing shrimp farming as a long-term growth industry.
Walmart has previously applied blockchain technology to tracking food in other countries like China. Distributed ledger technologies like blockchain purportedly make it easier for the firm to track its massive supply chains and to recall problematic food items or medicines should the need arise.
Building on the IBM Food Trust platform
Cointelegraph reported in September that a group of global coffee companies is partnering with Farmer Connect, a tech startup developing farm-to-client traceability tools, to use the IBM Food Trust platform to apply blockchain to coffee supply chain tracking. The startup worked with IBM to build the “Thank My Farmer” app, which provides consumers with data about coffee products, which include origin and pricing.
‘Big Four’ Exec Says Privacy is Key to Enterprise Blockchain Adoption
A senior executive at Big Four auditor Ernst & Young (EY) thinks blockchain will revolutionize commerce – if the community can solve its privacy issues.
“Blockchain is going to be the tool that ties together not just individual companies, but whole business ecosystems and networks”, says EY global innovation lead Paul Brody. “Enterprises will not go on to the public mainnet without privacy and security.”
In this interview with Christine Kim, Brody discusses a range of privacy solutions, including Nightfall, EY’s open source code repository. The protocol integrates zero-knowledge proofs with smart contracts, enabling private transactions on the public ethereum blockchain.
Procurements are one particular use case. Any enterprise that can leverage different pricing models often leaves money on the table when making purchase orders. Nightfall, however, can set up smart contracts “without any additional administrative or operational overhead” that execute at the best price, Brody argues.
Although the basic product remains free on GitHub, Nightfall’s transaction costs are still high at around $10. Brody thinks these costs could drop below $1 in the coming year, meaning that Nightfall could eventually be more cost effective than private, permissioned blockchains.
