Remember playing with Legos as a kid? Imagine building a tower where each block snaps perfectly onto the ones below it. But let’s now switch the game up a bit. Envision if once you placed a Lego block on top of another, it was there for good—no pulling it out or swapping it without everyone noticing. That’s blockchain in a nutshell.
Instead of plastic blocks, blockchain stacks blocks of information and creates a chain of these blocks. Each block contains thousands, potentially millions of raw data points, and once it’s added to the chain, it’s locked in place. And the best part? Everyone building with these digital Legos has an identical copy of the tower. If someone tries to sneak in a fake block, all the other builders will spot it right away.
Blockchain is changing how we trust and track just about everything. Banks are using it to move money around the globe faster than you can say “piggy bank.” Hospitals use it to keep your medical records secure while always keeping your doctor in the loop with the latest information. And for all you online shoppers, it’s working overtime to guarantee that the designer bag you’re eyeing is the real deal, not a knockoff. But the food industry? That’s a whole different story.
By 2025, one in five major grocers could use this technology to track your produce from farm to shelf. Scan an apple, and voila—its entire journey from orchard to store unfolds before you. And beyond the wow factor, blockchain could trace contamination to its source in minutes, not weeks. Think of all the money this tech could help save: a staggering $31 billion. We dig into the details below.
How Blockchain is Rewriting Our Food’s Story
Blockchain is a technology that can help ensure the safety and traceability of—and avoid waste—in everything from the steak on your plate to the apples in your fruit bowl; we’re seeing it at work in real time.
Picture this: You’re at the grocery store, eyeing a package of salmon. With blockchain, you could whip out your phone and see the entire journey of that fish—from the fisherman’s net to your shopping cart. That’s what Thai Union, a big fish in the seafood world (pun intended), is doing by launching a program that’s like a maritime GPS for your dinner, tracking seafood from ocean to table.
IBM’s Food Trust is also in the mix, working like a family tree for your food, connecting everyone from the farmer who grew your tomatoes to the truck driver who delivered them to your local supermarket. It’s all about transparency and trust—knowing your food’s story from start to finish. Companies such as TraceX Technologies in India and TE-Food in Hungary are also leading the charge by creating digital trails that follow your food from the farm to your fork.
Now, you might wonder, “Why all this fuss about tracking my groceries?” The numbers are pretty jaw-dropping. In 2024, we learned that we’re tossing out 1.05 billion tons of food each year, worth about $1 trillion. That’s like throwing away one out of every five bags of groceries you buy. More tragic? While we’re disposing of all this food, 282 million people face hunger.
But thanks to blockchain’s properties, we could see a future where food waste plummets, safety skyrockets, and Mother Nature gets a break. Think of a more honest, traceable, and waste-free supply chain.
Benefits of Blockchain for Food Traceability and Safety
Cast your mind back to spring and summer 2023. Picture yourself in the produce aisle, searching for a crisp head of lettuce for your dinner salad. You’re met with empty shelves as you glance around, a stark reminder of the recent wave of lettuce recalls. The Revolution Farms expanded recall, Fresh Express’s multi-state listeria scare, and G.O. Corporation’s 11,500-pound romaine lettuce recall due to potential deer feces contamination had brought producers to their knees and made consumers wary of their greens.
But what if there was a system that could track every leaf from seed to store shelf? Blockchain technology could have entered the picture and saved the day. It’s no coincidence that months after this lettuce recall, University professors Claudia Cozzio, Giampaolo Viglia, Linda Lemarie and Stefania Cerutti published a report in the Journal of Business Research titled “Toward an integration of blockchain technology in the food supply chain.” They highlighted a critical issue, stating that the “traceability of what we eat…[is] a lingering issue.” The researchers emphasized blockchain’s potential to enable “transparency across the value chain as it tracks a product’s origin, location and history.”
For those lettuce recalls, blockchain could have pinpointed the exact farms, processing facilities, and distribution centers involved in seconds. Imagine the difference—instead of tossing out entire shipments, we could isolate the problem batches with surgical precision, saving time, money, and delicious produce. Every transaction and every handoff in the supply chain gets logged in real time. Farmers, distributors, retailers, and even consumers can access this information, creating unprecedented trust. No more guessing games about where your lettuce came from or its handling.
Blockchain is also a powerful tool for meeting stringent food safety regulations that keep producers on their toes. Compliance becomes a breeze, with every step documented and an unbreakable chain of accountability created. When food safety inspectors come knocking, producers can pull up a complete, tamper-proof history of their products in seconds.
Potential for Grocery Sector
Frank Yiannas had seen it all before. As Walmart’s former vice president of food safety, he’d lost count of the shiny new technologies promising to solve their traceability headaches. Each time, hope would rise, only to be dashed as another system fell short. So when blockchain technology came knocking, Yiannas rolled his eyes. “Great,” he thought, “another high-tech solution looking for a problem.” He’d been burned too many times to get excited about fads. Blockchain? Another flash in the pan, he figured. Little did he know, his skepticism was about to be turned on its head.
Karl Bedwell, senior director at Walmart Technology, noted, “Creating a (traceability) system for the entire food supply ecosystem had been a challenge for years, and no one had figured it out.” But because blockchain focuses on “trust, immutability, and transparency,” they figured it could be a good solution to the traceability problem.
Intrigued but not yet convinced, Yiannas decided to test blockchain. He bought a package of sliced mangoes from a Walmart store and asked his team a simple question: Where did these mangoes come from? The challenge was to trace the fruit’s origin as quickly as possible.
What followed was a frustrating process all too familiar in the food industry. Team members spent days calling and emailing distributors and suppliers, piecing together a mango package’s journey bit by bit. Finally, after seven days, they had an answer—seven whole days to trace the origin of a single package of fruit. This delay was unacceptable in an age where food-borne illnesses can spread rapidly.
This experience set the stage for a blockchain-based proof of concept. Partnering with IBM in 2016, Walmart developed a food traceability system using Hyperledger Fabric. The results were staggering when they tested it with the same mango tracing challenge. They identified the origin of the mangoes in just 2.2 seconds.
This dramatic improvement from 7 days to 2.2 seconds was Yiannas’ “aha” moment. His initial reluctance gave way to excitement as he grasped blockchain’s potential. He’d been wary of yet another traceability system, given how previous attempts had fizzled out when scaled up. But now he understood why—those old systems were built on centralized databases, a poor match for the sprawling food industry. In blockchain, Yiannas saw a system that could keep pace with the industry’s needs for the first time. In his words, “Blockchain, with its decentralized, shared ledger felt like it was made for the food system.”
The mango tracing experiment was just the beginning. Walmart soon expanded the blockchain system, and by September 2018 it was tracing over 25 products from five different suppliers. The potential for operational efficiency and cost reduction became clear:
- Direct connections between farmers and retailers, reducing the need for intermediaries and their associated markups.
- Automated execution of sales through smart contracts, eliminating paperwork and payment delays.
- Real-time tracking of shipments, reducing disputes and lost inventory.
- Rapid, precise product recalls in case of food safety concerns, minimizing waste, and maintaining consumer confidence.
Soon after, Walmart’s CEO began reaching out to other food companies, including competitors, to share the technology. Eventually, this collaboration led to the creation of what we now know as the IBM Food Trust, a blockchain-based platform involving major players like Nestle and Unilever.
Why Blockchain’s Harvest Isn’t Quite Ripe Yet: Challenges and Limitations
That said, not everyone is Walmart. What if you were a small farm owner handling daily operations while trying to keep up with the latest tech trends? Suddenly, everyone’s talking about blockchain, and you’re left scratching your head, wondering if it’s worth the hassle.
The promise of blockchain in the food industry sparkles like a shiny new gadget, but let’s face facts—it’s not all sunshine and roses. For the average player in the food supply chain, adopting blockchain feels like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
First off, there’s the tech side of things. Blockchain’s like that overeager kid in class who raises their hand for everything but can’t quite keep up when things get busy. As more food supply chain transactions pile up, the system starts huffing and puffing, struggling to keep pace. We’re talking about serious scalability issues here. It’s about more than speed too—imagine trying to stuff an entire harvest’s worth of data into a digital filing cabinet that’s already bursting at the seams.
When it comes to money, implementing blockchain also isn’t exactly like picking up a new tractor—it’s more like building a whole new barn. The capital investment required is enough to make any small business owner’s wallet break out in a cold sweat. Let’s crunch some numbers:
Starting with blockchain can cost from $100,000 to $300,000 for small and medium-sized enterprises in the food industry.
Once your blockchain system is up and running, annual maintenance and operational costs will range between $20,000 and $50,000.
According to Deloitte, 39% of food industry executives are unsure of the return on investment on blockchain projects—some projects can even take up to five years to break even.
And beyond buying the tech, you need people who know how to use it too. That means either hiring new talent or training your existing staff, and neither comes cheap. It’s a big ask for an industry that’s not exactly known for being on the bleeding edge of tech. In fact, many businesses are still running on systems older than some of their employees.
All of this uncertainty has the industry approaching blockchain like a cat eyeing a bathtub full of water. Sure, there might be some benefits on the other side, but is it worth the risk of getting soaked? Many businesses prefer to stick with what they know, at least for now.
What’s more, regulations around blockchain are about as clear as mud. There are no unified standards to follow, so businesses have to wing it and essentially fend for themselves. As if keeping up with regular food safety rules wasn’t enough.
Blockchain’s Menu: Serving Up Trust in Tomorrow’s Food Industry
By 2034, your dinner plate might come with a side of blockchain. Imagine scanning a QR code on your steak to trace its journey from pasture to your plate, or verifying the authenticity of your organic tomatoes with a smartphone app. As Randy Jagt, partner and Future of Food lead at Deloitte, says, “The global food supply chain is missing an essential ingredient: trust.” Blockchain offers a tamper-proof digital ledger that could restore that trust, providing unprecedented transparency in an industry plagued by food scares and mislabeling scandals.
Looking ahead, the integration of blockchain with internet-connected devices could transform food tracking and safety. Picture tiny sensors watching over your tomatoes from farm to table, keeping tabs on everything from the soil they grew in to how cool they stayed during their travels. And with such real-time food reading as a regularly updated diary, it could turn the tables in cutting food waste and improving safety. Take the event of contamination. With the power of blockchains, products could be traced and isolated within hours instead of weeks, potentially saving lives and billions in recall costs. The World Economic Forum seems to agree, emphasizing that “Widespread implementation of blockchain in the food industry will improve accessibility and quality of produce, ultimately saving lives.”
The future of blockchain in food looks bright, but don’t expect it to happen overnight. We’ll probably see it take off first with fancy foods and tricky supply chains—think your gourmet coffees, fresh-caught seafood and top-shelf steaks. Everyday groceries will likely catch up later. For this tech to really take root, though, we’ll need to see some serious teamwork across the board—farmers, truckers, supermarkets, and even rival companies all pulling in the same direction. The government will need to step up, too, by laying down rules so blockchain data carries real weight as proof of where food comes from and how good it is. Pull all that off, and who knows? In a decade’s time, blockchain in our food supply might be a mainstay.
Integrating blockchain into our food system is a big challenge, but the payoff could be huge. Think about it: farmers getting fair prices for quality produce, stores backing up their claims about freshness and origins, and all of us knowing exactly what we’re eating and where it came from. Blockchain is catching on, but it’s not going to happen overnight. Still, isn’t this the kind of change we should be pushing for? It’s about more than just fancy tech—it’s about building a food system we can really trust. Next time you’re grocery shopping or eating out, imagine being able to scan a code and see the whole story of your food—from farm to table. That’s the future blockchain could bring. It won’t be easy, but if we get it right, it could change the way we think about food for good.
