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Blockchain could significantly improve food supply worldwide, since it transforms the food industry, the CEO of Foodshed.io Daniel Beckmann tells Dan Patterson of TechRepublic, because it is used to monitor agricultural production. The following is a modified transcript of the interview.
Dan Patterson: The blockchain, you may have heard of it, has many theoretical purposes. When it comes to the food chain, blockchain technology has a lot of practical purposes.
How can blockchain help in the digital transformation of the entire food chain and particularly in locally sourced and locally sold food?
Daniel Beckmann: Blockchain is actually very useful in this space. I understand that there are some spaces where there might be questions about it, but in terms of logistics, this will be really useful for us and the world. Right now, what we're trying to do at Foodshed is bringing local food online.
The current food chain was built for the '60s, when they tried to give everyone the cheapest food at the lowest price, which would stay on the shelf longer, without ruining it. This is a system designed to transfer huge things to huge places, to large numbers of people.
What the blockchain will allow us to do is bring the smallest and most independent farmers into the food chain, so that we can get things that are local. You can also get more variety in your grocery stores and restaurants.
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And what's the key here, especially with blockchain. We can bring more people into the food chain to deliver them without messing up the records. And in many cases they still use notes, contracts and things like that. But the other really big advantage, is that if there is contamination, we can safely discover the source of that contamination, because it's really important, and remove it immediately from anywhere. You might remember the recent fear of Roman lettuce. When something like this happens, it hits all the Roman lettuce on the west coast. This is because they do not know where the contamination is and could make people sick, causing something like that to happen.
It wastes a lot of food, pulling it down. It also damages the reputation of companies. There are many contaminations that do not matter, and those are the ones they find quickly. Blockchain allows us to bring together a more complicated chain. It makes us feel safe, when we are pulling down food, that more people do not get sick, saving a lot of waste.
Dan Patterson: This may seem, for the insiders, as a rhetorical question, but to take us inside, help us to understand how food is recorded and printed on the blockchain.
Daniel Beckmann: Well, basically we will have a QR code that will follow it through the process.
What many people may not realize is that their vegetables and loose fruit often come in a package or can have a sticker on it. Start looking for these things when you're in grocery stores. We talked to some people to actually have QR codes on real food. We're not sure we still need to be there, but having someone crawl that at each stage of the process also lets us know where the food comes from and whether you're at the store, or potentially in a menu, you might find out when food was chosen, which is something that some people are enthusiastic about now. Once you start living in that world, it's hard to go back. It's very beautiful.
Dan Patterson: And the chains themselves? Do you use bitcoin blockchain? Do you create your own blockchain or is there a specification for food?
Daniel Beckmann: Well, there are some great players out there who work in this space. IBM is probably paving the way. They did some tests with some big chains out there.
We are developing our own version, but we must use some of the available platforms. If we become really technical about it, we worked in Stellar, to begin with. We are excited about the possibilities of IOS. We hope this is a simpler platform for many more people to join, and become operational right away. This is something we are building and we are starting to bring online.
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Dan Patterson: So, give us a schedule, maybe designed from 18 to 36 months, where is not only your technology, but blockchain technology with the existing food chain?
Daniel Beckmann: We'll see what happens, because we're going to stop some things in this space. Generally, food is a bit slower to change. There are no people who innovate naturally in this space. There is no motivation to do it. There will be players who will try it at that time. We'll be one of those major players who are using it, but it's a bit of a case, we're building a new home this year, compared to the '50s and' 60s. We have the advantage of creating something from scratch right now. While many places that own their fleets and have their own ways of doing things in many, many different warehouses and similar investments, they are not necessarily interested in doing so.
It is hard to say when they will arrive online, but more and more often our customers ask why it makes them feel good. It makes them feel safe. And there's a practical reason for this. I'll be honest with you: if we did not need to use blockchain, or did not think it would be an advantage, we would not do it. It has a disadvantage now, where it takes a little longer to load. It's a bit of education that we have to give people up and down the chain, literally, to do this. But I think that in a year and 18 months we will have applied a blockchain application in Food Chat.
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