The Hershey Company, popular producer of chocolate bars and treats in America, announced Tuesday the company has joined AdLedger, a blockchain-based advertising consortium to put the technology to use.

Media outlet AdWeek reported that this partnership would affect more than just advertising, since Hershey intends to use distributed ledger blockchain technology to increase the efficiency of its own factories.

Vinny Rinaldi, head of addressable media and technology at Hershey, said such technology could be used to track the production of chocolate from “bean to to bar” and that “this would be a fundamentally massive shift in the way we think.”

AdLedger is a distributed ledger based on Ethereum, the second most popular public blockchain in the world. It uses highly distributed, cryptographically secured transaction logs to create a trustworthy tamperproof network. The company was founded by IBM Corp., broadcast media company Tegna Inc. and blockchain provider MadHive Inc. in 2018 as a nonprofit with the objective of disrupting the advertising industry with trustworthy and transparently auditable advertisement sales.

Alongside Hershey, other companies reportedly joined the AdLedger consortium, including French media group Publicis Media and The Global Audience Based Buying Conference & Consultancy.

Blockchain technology has been explored as a way to standardize and bring better tracking and fraud prevention to the advertising industry during the past few years. Notable examples include a TV ad blockchain partnership between Comcast Corp., NBCUniversal and Walt Disney Co., marketing analytics platform Lucidity and a partnership between Mediaocean LLC and IBM to form an advertisement supply chain blockchain.

By testing blockchain technology to track the production of chocolate in its factories, Hershey will be joining a long line of industries experimenting with the technology.

Although blockchain adoption has seen some setbacks, successful proof-of-concept launches have included a supply traceability platform from Microsoft Corp. and Adents International, an aviation parts tracking system for the U.S. Navy and a food safety supply chain tracking platform developed by IBM.

Using blockchain technology, Hershey would be able to get a highly granular view of how cocoa beans move from its suppliers — farmers who harvest and package the raw product — offload into its factories, go through refinement and processing and finally become the tasty chocolate bars that consumers love to rip the wrappers off.

With highly trustworthy historical logs of each step in the process from “bean to bar,” it means that quality can be more readily assured by knowing the origin and disposition of every bar in a crate before it ships out to store shelves.

The IBM Food Trust food safety blockchain has shown as much can make it quicker and safer to recall contaminated food and track the origin. And, with tracking technology flowing trustworthy data all into the platform, it becomes easier to identify where snags and slowdowns occur in the manufacturing pipeline.

There are 80 brands of Hershey’s products and, according to Reference.com, the company has produced more than a billion pounds of chocolate since 2011. Global sales by Hershey amounted to an estimated $7.52 billion in 2017.

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