April 18, 2022

Carrefour has become the first retailer to use blockchain technology with its own branded organic products.

The distributed ledger technology behind Bitcoin allows consumers to scan the QR code on a label to access information about a product’s lifecycle, including:

• Its origin and the path taken: Name of the producer, location of the field, place of packaging and means of transport;
• Its quality: Harvest date, analysis results, variety and seasonality;
• Its organic certification: Date of conversion, official certificate and additional initiatives implemented by the producer.

“By associating this technology for the first time with our organic products, we are fulfilling our objective of becoming the leader in the food transition for all,” said Benoît Soury, director of the organic market at Carrefour. statement.

Blockchain systems store data securely and tamper-proof. Potentially replace paper processes and disjoint data systems, the enhanced blockchain data visibility promises to solve food safety problems faster as well as overcome inaccurate supply and demand forecasts, manual errors, counterfeiting, and compliance violations.

Walmart started using IBM’s Food Trust blockchain technology to track lettuce and spinach in 2018, but the technology has only slowly gained traction despite the hype surrounding cryptocurrencies.

Barriers slowing down mainstream adoption include a general lack of knowledge about blockchain and its applications, customization issues, and challenges correlating multiple ways to submit data.

Before being widely used, the costs must probably come down, although they have gone up the recordkeeping requirements proposed by the According to The Wall Street Journal.

Jan Beránek, CEO and founder of U+, a technology consultancy, believes that a business case still needs to be made for suppliers to replace current tracking and compliance methods, such as GS1. He recently said Food engineering magazine, “In order to justify building or integrating a blockchain solution within their business, it should provide additional revenue, reduce costs, provide a competitive advantage, or meet compliance requirements.”