Supply Chains get a Blockchain Boost with IBM Food Trust

Subscribe To Download This Insight

By Michela Menting | 4Q 2018 | IN-5285

In October 2018, IBM announced the general commercial availability of the IBM Food Trust, a blockchain platform for supply chain management of the food industry. The project was started in early 2016 and has been in testing ever since, with a number of high-profile agrifood stakeholders—including Walmart, Nestlé, Dole, Tyson Foods, Kroger, and Unilever, among others—trialing the technology. French retailer Carrefour is the latest to join the network. Today, IBM is offering a range of pricing models, starting at US$100 per month for small businesses (those earning under US$50 million) to US$10,000 per month for large enterprises (US$1 billion and over). The firm also offers an educational “virtually guided onboarding” package for a one-time charge of US$5,000, which includes IBM expert-led sessions for onboarding support.

Registered users can unlock up to five pieces of premium content each month.

Log in or register to unlock this Insight.

 

IBM Food Trust Goes Live

NEWS


In October 2018, IBM announced the general commercial availability of the IBM Food Trust, a blockchain platform for supply chain management of the food industry. The project was started in early 2016 and has been in testing ever since, with a number of high-profile agrifood stakeholders—including Walmart, Nestlé, Dole, Tyson Foods, Kroger, and Unilever, among others—trialing the technology. French retailer Carrefour is the latest to join the network. Today, IBM is offering a range of pricing models, starting at US$100 per month for small businesses (those earning under US$50 million) to US$10,000 per month for large enterprises (US$1 billion and over). The firm also offers an educational “virtually guided onboarding” package for a one-time charge of US$5,000, which includes IBM expert-led sessions for onboarding support.

Delivering Business Value

IMPACT


The IBM Food Trust solution is based on IBM’s Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) offering. It leverages the Hyperledger Fabric platform (a blockchain framework implementation hosted by the Linux Foundation) to provide a number of modules that suits different use cases. The three that are currently available are for data entry and access (basic shared-ledger functionality), trace (for tracking and provenance), and certificate management (for quality control and auditing purposes). These integrated modules are coupled with onboarding services and developer zones at the solution layer. At the platform layer, the IBM Blockchain provides a range of features, including information about data assets (transactions, events, certificates, data payloads) and access control (open, private, restricted, linked). The functional architecture is designed in such a way as to allow launch as quickly and seamlessly as possible. IBM is working on two more modules for freshness of goods and for consumers (so that they may be able to see product provenance) and is planning on allowing third party modules to be offered on the platform as well.

IBM’s ability to test its technology on large-scale, international settings through partners like Walmart has provided it with valuable opportunities to find out what works well for this specific industry. The technology is, in fact, the least important feature in the offering. It turns out that the more important elements relate to the business value, the governance model, the standards, and interoperability capabilities. The first piece (i.e., the business value) primes the others. The stakeholders’ drivers can vary considerably, and IBM’s answer to that is to offer a set of varying modules. Governance is also key to ensuring the protection of rights and information. As such, governance policy is maintained by an independent advisory council created with early adopters and other participants of the IBM Food Trust. They define the policies around data, membership, trust models, transactions, interoperability, and third parties. Related to that is, of course, the development of standards to allow interoperability for both the business (e.g., GS1 standard for supply chain data) and the technology (e.g., Hyperledger Fabric) fronts.

Last but not least, the technology itself must be accessible, affordable, and usable. The Software as a Service (SaaS) aspect breaks down some of the barriers needed for running a blockchain-based application, eliminating the need for users to learn how to set up and run costly infrastructure. To this end, IBM is also leveraging third-party providers such as Emerson (for cold chain technology for temperature-related information on in-transit), 3M (for food safety diagnostic equipment), Trellis Framework (for open-sourced food industry standard and Application Programming Interface [API] service), and Centricity (for collecting, protecting, and sharing agronomic and compliance data) to provide some of the accompanying hardware, software, and data solutions.

BaaS at the Heart of Democratization

RECOMMENDATIONS


The IBM Blockchain is the workhorse powering the IBM Food Trust and the many other platforms that are democratizing blockchain in supply chain management, especially regarding shipments, transport, and life sciences. BaaS offerings—whether from IBM or other providers such as Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, or Cisco—provide the foundation on which applications can be more easily built, tested, and hosted. They are the primary enablers of the diverse and numerous modules that can be developed at the application layer. The market is still fairly nascent, with the first BaaS offering emerging only last year. With less than a dozen providers today, there is significant room for expansion. Great opportunities exist for industries beyond those currently testing the waters, especially around industrial and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. IBM Food Trust paves the way as one of the very first commercialized platforms, highlighting the many possibilities enabled by blockchain.