Decentralizing Contamination - Disrupting or Enhancing Food Safety
This blog discusses the potential of blockchain technology to revolutionize supply chain management, particularly in ensuring food safety by enabling traceability from farm to fork. It highlights the challenges of adopting this technology, including resistance from entrenched players and the need for scalable solutions.
“Work smarter, not harder.”
Although I frequently hear this adage used by college students attempting to rationalize a lack of academic effort to themselves, it always keeps me wondering – what if we worked smarter?
Born in 1998, my generation has become acclimated to the quick evolution of technology. What started with the mainstream adoption of the internet quickly morphed into mainstream adoption of smart gadgets – smart phones, smart tv’s, smart watches. These gadgets streamline our lives and provide a user-friendly value with minimal technical knowledge required, but now technology is taking another leap forward. Blockchain has created a new technological frontier that will enable what I call smart operations; including but not limited to smart contracts, smart stocks, and smart food.
As an aspiring business student and supply chain enthusiast, I found myself focusing on the resilience of supply chain operations and how responsive they are to disruptions during this past holiday season; most recently the E-coli outbreak resulting from contaminated romaine lettuce. As businesses scrambled to pull their produce and identify the source of contamination, I kept thinking to myself – couldn’t this have been avoided, or solved in about five minutes? Isn’t there a decentralized solution?
Using blockchain, smart operations will be to business what smart gadgets are to individuals. Contractual obligations, financial services, and supply chain transparency will streamline the lives of businesses that choose to adopt this technology through the free-flow of secure information. Though blockchain is not a catchall solution, it’s perfect for solving certain subsets of business problems.
An example of one subset is within the realm of food safety; and it starts with a farm to fork mentality.
By offering end-to-end supply chain transparency and enabling a system of traceability across a supply chain, we can specifically pinpoint every detail about where something was grown. In an agricultural supply chain, this is a monumental value-added service to the end consumer. Who wouldn’t want to know where the turkey they’re eating came from, how the coffee beans they’re drinking were harvested, or if the romaine lettuce they’re serving will give the family E-Coli? As it turns out, this problem could have been solved in five minutes, or even 2.2 seconds.
Instead, it took many businesses about two months after the initial romaine lettuce recall to determine which suppliers were affected and if their produce was safe.
The food safety implications here have the potential to completely revolutionize the agricultural supply chain industry – although there will be many technological and practical challenges that will plague mainstream adoption of this technology, such as the ability to scale.
In any supply chain-styled industry, it seems there are an unfathomable number of intermediaries that look to make money through any aspect of the business, whether it be freight brokerage, transportation, warehousing, advertising etc. – but the question must be asked: where do they add value?
Whereas the practical business application of any blockchain system is to transfer something of value through a trusted P2P network, and the blockchain enables trust through a system of cryptographic proofs rather than a trusted third party, there are key players entrenched in existing infrastructure that want nothing to do with uprooting how things are done currently. I believe this resistance to change will be the determining factor in who’s businesses are disrupted, and who’s are ultimately enhanced.