In February 2018, 37 undergraduate athletes were poisoned with fried fish. The baseball players complained of a burning pain in their stomachs and were hospitalized for food poisoning.
In July 2018, 155 people were poisoned by street food in Kyzyl in Tyva Republic, Russia. The cause of the mass poisoning was raw chicken eggs. The owner of the store that sold them knew nothing of where they came from.
At the same time 287 people were poisoned in Kuwait. All the victims at the restaurant were having a popular dish — falafel. 53 people were hospitalized.
The only reason these incidents gained publicity was because of the large number of victims. Generally speaking, the media and the public aren’t even interested in small‐scale poisonings. The victims themselves often let poisoning incidents slide and don’t even call on authorities to inspect the stores or food vendors were they bought the bad product.
One in every ten people in the world fall victim to poor quality food
According to information from the World Health Organization, contaminated or spoiled food causes 600 million illnesses across the world every year. 420,000 people die from food poisoning.
Children under age 5 account for 40% of food poisoning incidents, and 125,000 children die from unsafe food every year. The most serious example in recent times was the poisoning of newborns in China. In 2008, 300,000 Chinese newborns were poisoned by powdered children’s formula which contained melanin.
Every country independently handles food poisoning cases. Russia, for instance, is proposing to establish a Food Agency, which will operate under the Agriculture Ministry. The new organization will be responsible for food quality in places that serve the public: cafes, restaurants, and cafeterias. The European Commission regulates the EU’s food quality issues.
Financial losses from poor quality food
Over the past 5 years low‐quality food and drinks have caused insurance losses in the order of $2 billion. The food sector is second only to the automotive sector in the frequency of product reviews.
Substandard quality food is caused by allergens, pathogens, and also various contaminants. In recent years, more and more US and European food markets are reviewing Asian‐produced foodstuffs. Experts are noting that Asia has done a poor job screening food products for a long time, and that causes problems.
How low‐quality food gets into people’s diet
Food products go through an extensive chain from the producer to the finished meal. Farmers or food processing plants are the start of the chain. Generally speaking, they do not directly work with retail chains and food vendors. Middlemen buy their produce and stockpile it in regional warehouses.
From regional warehouses, food gets moved to small local stores and cafes. Their owners are not willing to travel to farms and prefer to buy everything in one place. Generally speaking, there aren’t enough regional producers for major chains, and so federal middlemen enter the game who stockpile produce themselves from regional warehouses.
Produce goes from large‐scale middlemen to major retail chains, where at long last it ends its path to the kitchen or market stall. Bear in mind: no one can guarantee that there will only be two middlemen in the chain. The number of them can grow, which increases the price of produce and negatively impacts safety. Not everyone is able to comply with food storage standards — after all, installing ventilation and refrigerator units is expensive, and not everyone wants those expenses to cut into their profit margin.
That’s why the owner of a street food vendor in the Russian city of Kyzyl was unable to remember who produced and delivered the calamitous chicken eggs which sent hundreds of people to the hospital bed.
Let’s keep track of food products
We have mulled over food safety and players in the blockchain market. For instance, in August 2017 IBM started cooperating with Dole, Driscoll’s, Golden State Foods, Kroger, McCormick and Company, McLane Company, Nestlé, Tyson Foods, Unilever, and Walmart to establish a system to keep track of foodstuffs. Using IBM Cloud and IBM Blockchain, they created the IBM Food Trust project which enables them to keep track of food’s journey from farm to table using blockchain technology.
Companies and consumers can keep track of where food is coming from and going using barcodes or QR codes on the package. If Russia had a food blockchain, then it wouldn’t have been difficult to find out who was guilty of the food poisoning in Kyzyl. IBM Food Trust tracks a product from the moment farmers get it to the end user. And that means that all middlemen and the path of every specific product, all the way to store shelves, can easily be tracked in the supply chain. Of course, you could use an ordinary database for that, but blockchain makes it impossible to backdate information once it has been entered into it, and in this regard it is critically important.
It would be enough for authorities to see the record in a single out a group of people who could have failed to follow food safety procedures.
IBM Food Trust solves another important problem in the food industry — fraud. For example, when middlemen inflate the price of a type of products or indicate they were produced somewhere else. A blockchain enables users to identify if a product was falsified — after all, data on it will be in the chain, which is impossible to go back into and change. And if a farmer sent off a product on, say, August 5, then a middleman’s attempt to pass it off as a product shipped on August 10 will be doomed to failure. A retailer will immediately see that the date the product was prepared simply does not match the date when the product was sent off.
In practice, the Finnish fish company S‐Group is already utilizing IBM Food Trust. All buyers have to do is scan the QR‐code on the fish package or go to a website to find out where and when the pike or perch you purchased came from.
Right now, IBM Food Trust is available only to IBM partners. The only way to become part of the project is by directly asking the company.
It’s not only corporations using blockchain in the food market, but also blockchain technology enthusiasts. For instance, the AgUnity project wants to help small farmers find their place in the market. According to the team’s information, 50% of produce from small farmers are lost en route to market — they sit in middlemen’s warehouses and spoil over time, are stolen while being transported, or lose their saleability due to improper storage.
AgUnity is suggesting using a mobile app and blockchain to connect farmers and stores or cafes without middlemen. For instance, a farmer from Tyva could send eggs to a café and use an app to ensure they are not being stored past their accepted expiration date and did not pass through the hands of a middleman who might have failed to follow food safety procedures. What’s more is the owner of the café could be certain that the food products that were delivered truly are fresh and high‐quality.
The AgUnity project will help farmers earn even more money. After all, stores and cafes could pay farmers directly, cutting out middlemen, each of whom decreases the profit margin.
Automatic responsibility
Thanks to IBM’s efforts, blockchain is becoming an effective technology in the food market to monitor product quality. Producers, sellers, and buyers can always be sure of a product’s quality and also find out what middlemen companies it went through.
By steadily introducing blockchain onto the global food market, it will become possible to keep products that have not undergone quality control or were obtained from questionable sources off shelves. It may be possible, specifically with decentralized control, to decrease the number of poisonings and decrease farmers” incomes thanks to eliminating a large number of middlemen.
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