A large group of leading retailers and food companies today announced a collaboration with IBM Corp. to use the power of blockchain technology to strengthen consumer confidence in the global food system.

The consortium includes Golden State Foods, McCormick and Co., Nestlé, Tyson Foods and Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which will use IBM’s distributed ledger technology to enhance food supply chain safety.

Every year, one-in-ten people fall ill from food borne illnesses and contaminated food and approximately 400,000 people die. In many cases, finding the origin of the contamination, and other potentially contaminated products, means tracking down the shipment the food arrived in, the shipping routes, storage areas, the processing plants and the farms that produced it. Traceability and transparency in a supply chain for auditors could streamline and provide swift actionable info during a food contamination crisis that would allow for higher precision and action when a recall is underway.

In the current system, with separate systems tracking individual provider, shipping company and producer records a single recall can be surprisingly slow. For example, a recent salmonella outbreak in papayas took more than two months to complete an audit to trace the contamination source to a farm.  Using a fully digitized distributed ledger from end-to-end across the entire supply chain could cut that time down considerably. With this collaboration between food distributors and retailers, IBM intends to do exactly that.

“Blockchain technology enables a new era of end-to-end transparency in the global food system – equivalent to shining a light on food ecosystem participants that will further promote responsible actions and behaviors,” Frank Yiannas, vice president of food safety at Walmart. “It also allows all participants to share information rapidly and with confidence across a strong trusted network. This is critical to ensuring that the global food system remains safe for all.”

In the past, IBM used its blockchain platform to help individual supply chains within institutions streamline tracking and auditing the movement and production of products. By the end of 2016, IBM had teamed up with Walmart to build trial blockchain to track pork supply chains and even mangos moving across the world. The company Everledger used IBM’s blockchain last year to track diamond production and sales paving the way for luxury goods.

Jerry Cuomo, IBM’s vice president of blockchain technology, told SiliconANGLE that this collaboration represents one of the first major industrywide meeting of minds of its kind for supply chain collaboration. The consortium will use the technology not just to benefit one single institution in streamlining its own inner workings, but expand beyond a single company’s borders to allow insight into a segment of an entire global industry.

“This represents an expansion of a blockchain network that brings together multiple goods shipping institutions to build on that pilot for dealing with food quality,” Cuomo said. “Name brands are coming together to really do something.”

He said that this network shows how blockchain technology has begun to mature and that it is a snapshot of what is possible and happening today with the technology. Now trailblazers in the industry are getting busy not just building blockchain ecosystems but growing them and providing practical applications.

As the food supply chain blockchain comes online, it will allow all of the consortium members to interconnect and share data on the movement of products. However, some of the large brands involved in this blockchain run competing supply chains or interact with competing retail outlets and all need to be open and transparent to regulatory agencies.

IBM’s blockchain platform helps resolve this because its use of distributed ledger technology allows a supply chain to keep its shipment data private from other members of the network, while still reaping the benefit of having a record of the activity. This means that an individual member of the IBM supply chain blockchain can feel secure in having its data on the network and auditors can still get a global view of the entire chain across private companies to track the movement of goods without leaking sensitive information.

Cuomo said he believes that this capability of blockchain technology, in addition to adding traceability and helping streamline the integration of “digital paperwork” as a ledger, makes the application of blockchain technology perfect for something like supply chains.

By allowing multiple entities in a single industry, all of whom interact, to store data securely, safely and privately in a single distributed network it opens up a variety of possibilities that did not exist before. Previous industry networks existed in their own cloistered silos with data sequestered away and unavailable until each segment in a supply chain could be queried, so it could take a lot of digging to trace the route of a single pineapple.

With a blockchain, it would only be a matter of opening up the permissions and following transactions with the pineapple back to the source.“Unlike any technology before it, blockchain is transforming the way like-minded organizations come together, enabling a new level of trust based on a single view of the truth,” said Marie Wieck, general manager of IBM Blockchain.

SiliconANGLE Chief Executive John Furrier said he believes this effect a part of the democratizing and disruptive ability of blockchain technology. As with IBM and the supply chain, the use of blockchain helps outlay social and external costs, such as the cost of coordination and getting all these people to work together who didn’t know each other.

IBM has also announced its new IBM Blockchain Platform, which builds on IBM’s Hyperledger Fabric V1 runtime to provide an optimized enterprise-ready environment. The IBM Blockchain Platform will be used in the food supply chain collaboration as a way to deliver governance and operational support for multiinstitution business networks.

In addition to food safety, IBM is advancing other blockchain supply chain initiatives using the IBM Blockchain Platform and expanding its own horizons into other industries. IBM has begun work on an automated blockchain-based automated billing and invoicing system with Lenovo Group Ltd. that also allows audit-ready solutions for traceability of billing and operational data.

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