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How Blockchain Technology Can Preserve Food Safety

Recently, there has been a large scale case of E.Coli outbreaks in the US, affecting mostly lettuce and lettuce based products. Due to the disastrous effects of the bacteria, keeping it away from customers is of the utmost priority. The difficulty in doing this arises from the near impossibility of fully tracing back a food product to its source. Between the restaurant that serves it and the farm that grows it, there may be a multitude of middlemen, each with varying degrees of documentation. This leads to a situation where in order to preserve safety, drastic and damaging precautions must be taken, severely impacting business. As such, any tool that can improve visibility can help any business dodge the bullet of recalls.

WHAT IS BLOCKCHAIN

While blockchain technology is most commonly associated with cryptocurrencies, the underlying principle is widely applicable. Blockchain is essentially a digital distributed record. Every action is recorded on a block which is spread across every element in the system, in this case computers. This ensures that every member of the system can see the entire history of the record, increasing transparency.

HOW BLOCKCHAIN IMPROVES SAFETY

The main problem with recalls, especially relating to food, is the poor visibility throughout the chain. If one truck that moved the product between two warehouses had a defective refrigerator, that could severely impact your business down the road. That’s why blockchain becomes useful. A distributed ledger that all members have access to, from the end user to the supplier, means that everybody keeps track of what everybody else is doing. This greatly improves your ability to accurately track what products to recall and when those products were affected, improving safety in your business.

To learn how TPSynergy can implement blockchain technology into your supply chain, contact us to schedule a FREE one-on-one demo.

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