The food supply chain in China is about to get a safety boost.

It’s set to come from a new Blockchain Food Safety Alliance kicking off with a collaboration between IBM Corp., major retailer Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Chinese e-commerce company JD.com Inc. and the Tsinghua University National Engineering Laboratory for E-Commerce Technologies. These efforts expand already existing pilot programs developed by IBM and Walmart that experimented with distributed ledger blockchain technology, which was used to track pork shipments in China and mangoes in the United States.

Following IBM’s announcement in August, this development expands on the company’s consortium of retail chains working together to build a global food safety supply chain by bringing it into China. Recent testing by Walmart showed that the application of blockchain technology to supply chains reduced the time to trace a package of mangoes from the farm to the shelf from days or weeks to seconds.

Walmart, JD, IBM and Tsinghua University said they will work with food supply chain providers and regulators to develop standards and solutions to build a strong foundation for a food safety ecosystem in China. “Through collaboration, standardization, and adoption of new and innovative technologies, we can effectively improve traceability and transparency and help ensure the global food system remains safe for all,” said Frank Yiannas, vice president of food safety and health at Walmart.

Blockchain technology provides a tamperproof ledger that can be share supply chain information between separate companies that are all connected by the supply network. Blockchains supply a level of cryptographic protection that makes it hard to tamper with, that same cryptography allows for a level of privacy for potentially proprietary information attached to supply chain records. This is all made possible while also providing an auditable history that regulators, food safety experts and others can trust and inspect without leaking that proprietary information.

“Throughout the world, and particularly in China, consumers increasingly want to know how their food is sourced,” said Yongli Yu, president of JD-Y, JD.com’s supply chain research unit. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 1 in 10 people globally become sick from contaminated food every year — an estimated 600 million per year.

China has seen numerous problems with food safety. The country enacted laws to increase attention to food safety in 2015 and an academic estimated that China loses more than $750 million every year to the same. As recent as this year, authorities in Tanjin uncovered a counterfeit food seasoning operation making potentially toxic soy sauce, vinegar and soup base mix. This discovery is part of a long trend of toxic food being sold in China, including one devastating scandal in 2008 involving fake milk and baby formula that hospitalized over 54,000 infants. 

The Blockchain Food Safety Alliance hopes to use this new technological innovation and the brand security included to increase communication throughout the food supply chain.

As a result, counterfeit food on shelves would be easier to detect and trace back to its origin as participants would be more willing to communicate. Furthermore, unexpectedly contaminated foods could be quickly traced back to their origin, and related batches could be pulled and tested in record time with the level of intercommunication a blockchain imposes.

Tsinghua University said the insights gained from this alliance and any blockchain technology food safety innovations that grow out of it will provide a roadmap of how to help improve processes such as recalls and verifications and thus enhance consumer confidence and save money.

At the same time, that increased transparency and efficiency across the entire process would lead to less illness and death caused by bad food in China and thus save lives.

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