| |SEPTEMBER 20228CIOReviewIN MY OPINIONSMART, TRANSPARENT FOOD SOURCING WITH BLOCKCHAINThe Problem with Food TraceabilityThe world's food system is changing. An increasingly complex supply chain provides consumers with year-round access to fresh fruits and vegetables. With this, customers expect the variety and availability of an endless shelf whether shopping online or in a store. Our customers also trust us to ensure safe, high-quality, sustainable, and affordable food.By Tejas Bhatt, Senior Director, Food Safety Innovation ­ Walmart and Archana Sristy, Senior Director, Blockchain Platforms ­ Walmart Global TechnologyWalmart operates a complex business spanning 27 countries and serving over 265 million customers weekly. We recognized an opportunity to use our size and scale to positively change the food system by minimizing food safety risks earlier in our supply chain. This led to an obvious question: "What does our entire food supply web look like?"To find out, we embarked on a journey to enable traceability and transparency using blockchain.Why Blockchain?Our first problem was scale. We struggled to find a technology that encompassed our global operations. After hearing about blockchain, which was being used to track cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, we invited a group of our U.S.- and China-based suppliers and competitors to participate in a pilot to test, learn, and scale the technology. The pilot showed permissioned blockchain could provide value and solve real-world problems in food supply chains. Immutability, consensus-driven, and democratic governance are few of the benefits of blockchain we identified. That's when we formally launched our blockchain initiative with fresh leafy green suppliers and recently expanded to our green bell pepper suppliers. Challenges and OpportunitiesBlockchain relies on each supply chain actor providing accurate information. We had to streamline supplier onboarding to the blockchain platform to create buy in and end-to-end visibility. Our suppliers range from large multinational corporations to small mom-and-pop farms, so not everyone had digitized data, which is a pre-requisite to using blockchain. Others--including Walmart--had data in multiple systems. We worked with our suppliers to integrate data from internal systems while ensuring data consistency across our supply chains. We also had Archana Sristy
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