Blockchain can stop you from eating infected lettuce?
Turns out there's more to blockchain technology than your preferred cryptocurrency. It's been touted for verifying the origin of food products. Could this protect your health in the long run?
I knew I had a good reason when I told my local burger joint to hold the lettuce.
From March to April 2018, FDA and CDC investigators discovered that several hospital admissions were caused by tainted romaine lettuce.
The big problem they faced was they didn’t know where the bad lettuce was coming from and where it had ended up. They tried to find the source but hit a wall.
Dr Laura Gieraltowski leads the CDC’s foodborne outbreak response team. Commenting on the situation, she said:
“Grocery stores might not keep the box that has the labels from the distribution center was or where the grower was. And right now, without that box, many stores don’t have a record of where the food product came from.”
Supermarket corporate buyers ran a trace of the infected lettuce to find its source. But this task took weeks because of the manual nature of the investigation process. By that time, their reputation had taken a blow and more people became sick.
So why did it take so long? And how will Blockchain help? Let’s investigate.
Food safety is mostly a manual process – even in developed countries. Hospitals report the foodborne illness to health boards who then investigate potential hotspots in the form of restaurants and food stores.
When a pattern of food safety risk emerges, it moves along to corporate who then manually track and trace the problem down to suppliers. This is where it gets tricky.
Food suppliers source from a complex network of farms and processors, which in turn can be local, regional or foreign. This complex sourcing risks small issues in one part of the network snowballing into large-scale crises.
Supermarket chains have realised that speed is critical to sensitive situations like these. The existing manual process of tracking the source of the problem then acting is exceedingly slow.
Blockchain has been seen by some - like Walmart and IBM’s partnership - as a potential solution for faster and irrevocable source tracking in food. The idea is to decentralise the tracking process and achieve 2 benefits:
No one can manipulate the data by “owning it”
Speed up traceability down to the source
Almost every person involved in the farm to supermarket process is involved in the food safety tracking program. The system caters for less tech-savvy farmers upstream while giving rich data (upon training) to inventory managers downstream.
So will this actually solve the problem?
It’s a good start.
Provenance has been a key issue in adjacent areas like cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. The financial and reputational risk of counterfeit products has been high enough for makers to put in authenticity measures. And it has mostly worked in those spaces.
Here are 2 concerns about Blockchain for food source tracing:
It won’t stop bad actors from manipulating the physical goods e.g. an intermediary could swap out good lettuce for bad lettuce… but why would they?
Blockchain needs a reasonable level of tech-savviness from all users in the chain — including the 73-year-old farmer who still uses a feature phone, for example
Nonetheless, it could speed up the process of finding the source of bad produce. For all its pitfalls, Blockchain may be a lifesaver in this particular scenario.