With blockchain’s growing importance in food production and safety, IDFA offered a webinar last week focused on the intricacies of this technology. Blockchain is essentially an electronic ledger used to record transactions of everything from financial transactions to food production timelines on a digital platform.

Frank Yiannas, vice president of food safety at Walmart, presented the logistics behind blockchain, stressing the importance of food transparency and traceability for today’s consumer.

“You can now trace the beginnings of any agricultural product at the speed of thought. Originally, inquiring about the origins of a piece of fruit would normally take over 6 days—now it takes only 2.2 seconds,” Yiannas said.

With this technology, interested parties can identify where a product was planted or produced, where it was packed, how it was transported, which borders it crossed, where it was processed, its distribution center and more.

Blockchain works by assigning a digitized encryption, which allows specific agricultural products to be tracked. Falsifying blockchain or committing food fraud is difficult since the ledger cannot be altered retroactively without alteration of all subsequent blocks and achieving consensus of the network.

Not only is speed of traceability a major benefit in blockchain, it also helps to quickly identify and head-off foodborne illness, while promoting food freshness and decreasing the amount of food waste. It can also accommodate regulatory requirements implemented midway through the food’s timeline by editing the blockchain as the movement of the food product is updated.

IDFA members can find the "Blockchain: Tracking the Future Webinar" audio and PowerPoint slides by logging onto IDFA’s new Knowledge Center