To stop exported food fraud and increase China’s trust in New Zealand products, Fonterra, New Zealand Post and Alibaba will trial Blockchain technology.
The agreement between the three companies makes it one of the first partnerships to use Blockchain technology in the supplychain at a large scale.
Australia Post and Blackmores in Australia, are also about to conduct a trial fromAustralia
PwC estimates that up to 40 per cent of food companies find food fraud hard to detect with current methods, with 39 per cent of companies believe their products are easy to counterfeit.
IBM announced that it had formed a blockchain consortium which includes the likes of Dole, Driscoll’s, Nestlé, Unilever and Walmart, to use the technology in the global food supply chain.
Tmall import and export general manager Alvin Liu said the technology aimed to “authenticate, verify, record and provide ongoing reporting of the transfer of ownership and provision of products and goods.
“The framework aims to achieve end-to-end supply chain traceability and transparency to enhance consumer confidence and build a trusted environment for cross-border trade across Alibaba’s Tmall Global platform.”
Blockchain technology is based on a distributed ledger system that stores all the activities, transactions and information publicly, and it cannot be modified.
By recording the transaction information on the blockchain, consumers can easily find where it came from and any related details about the product. Ultimately this will prevent fraudulent activities such as replacing the product with inferior ones or counterfeit products.
