IBM and Walmart suggest a way to achieve timely traceback of contaminated produce from farm to store

Anyone who walked through the produce section of their local grocery in the week before Thanksgiving could not help but be aware that all romaine lettuce and salad mixes that contained romaine lettuce had been removed from the shelves. The stores took this action in response to a November 20, 2018 warning from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that a multi-state outbreak of the Shiga toxin-producing E. coli O157:H7 (STEC) had been traced to the eating of romaine lettuce. As in most cases of a multi-state food borne illness, it took a period of time between the first reported illness and the identification of the food product responsible for the outbreak. The common link in the illnesses was romaine lettuce. The traceback process is tedious and takes a considerable amount to time to track the contaminated lettuce from the store where it was purchased, to the distribution center that supplied the store, and eventually the farm where it was grown and harvested. A standardized identifier for each lot of produce grown would shorten the traceback time considerably and could prevent additional illnesses.IBM Food Trust has developed a computerizes system to track the many links in the chain of transactions from farm to fork. Their system “uses blockchain technology to create unprecedented visibility and accountability in the food supply chain. It is the only network of its kind, connecting growers, processors, distributors, and retailers through a permissioned, permanent and shared record of food system data”