Fraudulent food: this is how blockchain is helping to solve this problem

Fraud, electoral fraud, financial fraud and now we also face food fraud. Food counterfeiting is a real problem, which governments and private companies have been attacking for years without much success. Fortunately, today the blockchain presents an alternative to provide security in the provenance of food.

For many years news reports have reported multiple cases of counterfeit food, mainly in China. A fact that has caused a great anguish in the world population, because facing the possibility of consuming harmful foods or that simply were not for which you paid is a constant source of uncertainty for health.

According to a report in 2016, conducted by the consulting firm PwC, the sum of frauds with food globally for the past year was around 40 million dollars. And among the most common forms of fraud is dissolution of products, substitution, concealment of poor quality ingredients and errors in labeling.

Faced with this reality, alternatives have been designed based on the properties of blockchain technology to address the problem of fraudulent food, mainly from the immutable tracking of supply chains.

Entitled as IBM, Ernst & Young and Hyperledger have set their sights on the benefits that could bring the qualities of the blockchain to the distribution chains; emphasizing the characteristic of the immutability of the data included within the system, mainly.

CONFUSIONS ON STICKERS
One of the first companies to spot the possibility of reducing food fraud with the blockchain implementation was Hyperledger with its open source Sawtooth Lake project. Although it did not start with the objective of being implemented for the supply traceability, it was soon decided to test a fish tracking system in order to establish how immutability, immediacy and automation work in accounting books since the net to the plate.

The use case that Sawtooth decided to try to solve one of the four causes of food fraud: the wrong labeling.

According to a study conducted by Oceana between 2010 and 2012, from which they collected more than 1,200 fish and shellfish, 33% of the sample analyzed was mislabeled. A high margin of error that can lead to great risks for those who work with fish, since they can endanger the lives of their customers by serving the wrong species or, on the other hand, lose money by paying at a premium for the fish they buy .

Sawtooth provides fish consumers with a label with extensive information about the fish to be taken to the mouth. The information would be available to the consumer thanks to an IoT (Internet of Things) device, specifically the date of fishing, the transfer - with specific data of satellite location and time - and the distribution channels through which it passed to reach the final buyer.

Although Hyperledger thought about testing Sawtooth with fish, the first implementation of the technology would soon come from Asia.

In China, the online sales company JingDong, known as JD.com, adopted the blockchain-backed supply chain to track beef. To do this, they allied with the Inner Mongolia Kerchin Cattle beef producer, and started the blockchain supply chain for the meat they sell on a daily basis; with the difference that they included to the equation proposed by Sawtooth the use of a QR code and not a smart device.

For months now, JD.com's online meat buyers have a QR code on the back of their packaging that directs them to the information about their supply chain. This information includes details such as age, weight, name and even what diet the cow had before being benefited.

QUALITY OF FOOD
The initiative of food vendors to ensure the authenticity of the products they offer does not end with JingDong, as Walmart and IBM - along with 10 other allied companies, including Nestlé, Golden State Foods, Kroger, McCormick and Company and McLane Company - were willing to study how to implement blockchain in the supply chain can avoid another of the massive problems of counterfeiting: the sale of outdated food.

According to the World Health Organization, 400,000 people die each year from poor food. A problem that mainly affects developing countries, the United States and China - where in 2015 they arrested 110 people to convert a thousand tons of pork in bad state in bacon and sausages.

Walmart not only decided to test with its allies the reliability of blockchain for the registration of the data of expedition of the food, but decided to implement a chain of supplies based on blockchain for the tracking of the pig in the markets of China; as we mentioned before, there is an important antecedent of falsification and the pork is the most consumed in the Asian country - about 54.6 tons per year.

And another sales company that joined the adoption of blockchain to lessen the levels of fraudulent food that could be offered was Alibaba, the number one online trading company in China, who made public their interest in reducing the risks of fraud using distributed accounting. Alibaba partnered with the consultancy PwC to build the Food Trust Framework, a project that aims to follow the food from the different farms to the plate to avoid errors with suppliers and sell food, and, above all, to ensure the quality of the products. products offered.

In addition to PwC, Alibaba has teamed up with two Australian companies: Blackmores in Canberra - a supplier of vitamins and nutritional supplements - and the Australian Post postal service, which will carry out pilot testing in the marketplace from their own chains. supply.

The aim of the Food Trust Framework is to provide reliable information to final consumers, taking into account the mistrust generated by labels and packaging that describe the components of food in general terms.

Another factor that takes into account the Alibaba project is that at a global level food without preservatives or additives has a higher cost to foods that were exposed to chemicals, such as those that accelerate the growth of meat. Therefore, it is important that buyers have access to reliable information about what they are consuming.

Ernst & Young has also joined this type of project, as this year launched a suite of corporate applications based on blockchain technology, called EY Ops Chain.

According to Paul Brody, Global Innovation Leader at EY, what they sought to develop was to "push the blockchain revolution by integrating finance with operations to industrialize this technology in companies." The EY package included services for the management of supply chains, integrating options of financial management, that is, inventory management, prices, invoicing, payments and other logistical information. An alternative that would facilitate the organization in proving to suppliers that, in effect, the food offered is the food delivered.

In addition, within a few weeks of the launch of EY Ops, the firm Ernst & Young unveiled its initiative for the protection of food quality, called Blockchain Food Quality Protection.

This project is aimed at tackling the problem of disguising the low quality ingredients, starting with the wines launched to the market. The platform allows the consumer to read a QR code (located on the back of the bottle), through which you can know the year of the harvest and the strain of wine that is ready to buy, the origin of the grape and details of the vineyard, and finally, the information of each of the transactions carried out between the distribution channels, to eliminate suspicion of dissolution of the wine.

GOVERNMENTS ALSO CONTRIBUTE
Private companies are not the only ones that must contribute to solve the problem of food counterfeiting. In fact, one of the main problems in China is that there is no defined legislation to attack the problem or regulate food producers, which is why there have been great scandals and tragedies.

For its part, the government of Japan is once again receiving the blockchain technology with the doors open and takes the first step among the governments of the world to control this way the supply chain. The adoption was made by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, announcing that they will begin working with a private blockchain platform to follow up on game meat.

The private platform is developed by Tech bureau Corp and is named Mijin. According to the information provided by the Ministry, what is intended is to follow the trail of meat from processing to the plate, because the objective is to verify the provenance of the meat.

However, unlike Sawtooth, the platform will work to automatically compare the data traditionally delivered with the data recorded in the block chain. In this way, once a difference between the data submitted to the Japan Game Foster Association is reported in Japan, an automatic alert will be issued.

But these are not all initiatives being undertaken to minimize the problem of food counterfeiting worldwide. A group of Arkansas cattle ranchers began tracking their shipments of beef and chicken with blockchain. Likewise, it is intended to bring to the plate chickens with unique identities in China; and from Australia they develop pilot tests with the tracing platform of the startup TBSx3. No doubt, a lot of related projects that prove that the use of blockchain in a new use case has been found worldwide, which solves a tangible problem for millions of people.

With these initiatives, technology that supports digital currencies once again proves that its potential extends from revolutionary uses to the financial industry and has the potential to vastly improve the quality of life of consumers.

However, it should be stressed that all these initiatives will not completely eliminate the problem of food counterfeiting without regulations, which is consistent with the magnitude of the problem, which is why government action on regulatory issues and the opening of the market for adapt to the alternatives.