Blockchain: could it be key to food safety?
The first food poisoning cases came to light in late March — eight patrons of fast-food restaurants in New Jersey suffered bloody diarrhea and cramps that sent them rushing to hospitals.
More than two months later, one person is dead in California, 75 others have been hospitalized and authorities still don’t know where a nasty strain of E. coli bacteria latched onto romaine lettuce from Yuma, Ariz. Their struggle to trace supply lines across 32 states, on a paper trail that often may be on paper, demonstrates the limits of tracing food by methods rooted in another century.
Food safety advocates and industry insiders say it may be time to borrow the encrypted accounting platform that drives cryptocurrency: blockchain.
“I often describe that as food traceability at the speed of thought — as quickly as you can think it, we can know it,” said Frank Yiannas, vice-president of food safety for Walmart, which is scaling up an IBM-driven pilot blockchain that already includes top suppliers such as Unilever, Nestle and Danone.
Not long ago, Yiannas, who guards the integrity of food in Walmart’s $280-billion (U.S.) grocery empire, would have brushed off the notion of an instantly “knowable” and verifiable food chain as fantasy. He heard about it two years ago, when Walmart was about to open a food safety institute in China, where 10 years ago, a baby formula adulteration scandal sickened 54,000 babies.
“Up until that point, I only knew that it was the technology behind bitcoin,” Yiannas said. “I will tell you I was a bit of a skeptic, just like many people are about the technology.”
Blockchain, for all its cloakand-dagger associations, is basically a democratized accounting system made possible by advances in data encryption. Rather than storing proprietary data behind traditional security walls, companies contribute encrypted blocks of data to a “distributed” ledger that can be monitored and verified by each farmer, packer, shipper, distributor, wholesaler and retailer of produce. No one can make a change without everyone knowing, and agreeing to it.
“If I want to change something or fudge something on my version of the ledger, I then have to share it with everybody else and they all have to agree to that,” Yiannas said. “You can’t have two separate sets of books. It’s one set of books that everyone sees.”
As it stands, no one can see the entire path from farm to fork.
Each time a food-borne illness breaks out, investigators have to work their way backward, one link at a time, from victims to fields, tracing multiple paths across separate companies and sometimes across international borders.
That linear approach can cost lives and waste billions of dollars in health-care costs, lost work hours and trashed food every year, health officials and analysts say. Food-borne illnesses can cost the U.S. economy $152 billion a year, with tainted produce responsible for a quarter of that damage, according to a Pew Charitable Trust study.
In the case of the romaine outbreak, consumers complained that they had no idea how to find out if they were buying lettuce from Yuma.
“To say to consumers that you shouldn’t be consuming romaine lettuce if it came from the Yuma area and yet that information at the point of consumption or the point of purchase isn’t readily available or obvious to the consumer, then that’s a problem,” said Stephen Ostroff, deputy commissioner for food and veterinary medicine at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
“At each point of that supply chain, you potentially are looking at hundreds and hundreds of records,” he said.
“Many of those records are stored and available in different ways, ranging from very sophisticated electronic systems ... to handwritten records. And they’re in different formats.”
Meanwhile, the offending lettuce is gone — consumed, or long ago tossed away after its 21-day shelf life expired, the FDA has said. No more lettuce is being grown in Yuma, either, according to the FDA, which cited industry sources.
Yiannas believes blockchain could have led investigators to likely culprits long before the lettuce vanished. “Walmart is not chasing blockchain because it’s a new fad or it’s a shiny coin,” Yiannas said. “The romaine incident is a perfect example of a real-world scenario where if tools were available, it might be managed a bit more effectively.”