The retail giant hopes to win trust with consumers on the meat moving through China. A decade ago in the United States, a deadly strain of E. coli in tainted spinach ripped through 26 states, killing three people and sickening more than 200. The outbreak represents what can happen when sourcing food—and tracing contaminations—goes horribly wrong. “Consumers, in general, stopped eating spinach. Restaurants pulled it off the menu,” says Frank Yiannas, vice president of food safety at Walmart WMT 0.95% . “If you could track and pinpoint where that came from faster, you could alleviate all that and ensure consumer confidence continues.” This is the impetus behind the retailer’s latest unlikely project intended to overhaul the supply chain. Walmart is teaming up with IBM IBM -2.76% and Tsinghua University in Beijing to digitally track the movement of pork in China on a blockchain, also known as a distributed ledger. Such a system could help prevent disaster scenarios like the fatal, nationwide outbreak described above, Yiannas says. Get Data Sheet , Fortune’s technology newsletter. Walmart plans to use technology developed by the Hyperledger Project, an open source software project that builds blockchain tools and is based out of the Linux Foundation, a non-profit organization that maintains the code for a popular eponymous operating system. The blockchain in question, a private database co-developed by IBM, is designed to provide the retailer with a way to indelibly record a list of transactions indicating how meat has flowed through a commercial network, from producers to processors to distributors to grocers—and finally, to consumers. “Consumers today want more transparency about where and how a product came to be,” Yiannas tells Fortune on a call from Beijing. “If you shine a light on the food system, that leads to transparency.” (Courtesy of Walmart) Paul Chang, […]
