IBM's Food Blockchain Is Going Live With a Supermarket Giant on Board

IBM is taking its food-tracking blockchain into production, making it one of the largest enterprise projects to achieve that milestone, and has signed European supermarket giant Carrefour to use it.

Announced Monday, the commercial launch of IBM Food Trust means that large players, as well as small and medium-size enterprises in the food industry supply chain, can now join the network for a subscription fee ranging from $100 to $10,000 a month.

"IBM Food Trust is the first production blockchain at real scale and we are super-excited to finally be making the product available broadly."

The mainstay of the IBM Food Trust commercial offering, explained Gopinath, is the ability to trace items backward and forward through the supply chain.

IBM Food Trust is without doubt leading the track-and-trace food space.

In July of this year there were 15 code commits from U.S. food giant Cargill, involving some kind of track and trace project; the word "Fish" is mentioned.

"I'd love it if IBM Food Trust was the only platform out there for this, but we are not that naive. If there's another one that is as good and as mature as Food Trust out there then absolutely we will be happy to do the interop."

"Being a retailer we knew that IBM was working with Walmart on IBM Food Trust in the U.S. primarily," he said.

In addition to the existing Carrefour Quality Lines live on the blockchain, the plan is to use IBM Food Trust to include international brands, said Delerm, such as some of those already working with Food Trust like Nestle and Unilever, as well as exploring organic produce-tracking.

Stepping back, Food Trust is one of IBM's main blockchain buckets; another is shipping and global trade, and in this area, the flagship platform is IBM's collaboration with Maersk, dubbed TradeLens.