Blockchain battles China’s fake food

Photo credit: Jp Valery / Unsplash

Blockchain, the digital ledger system that underpins Bitcoin, is being put to use to fight China’s “fake” food problem.

Counterfeit soy sauce, rice, wine, and eggs are among the potentially deadly items that have been found for sale in the country. Now JD, China’s second biggest online shopping company, is fighting back by using blockchain to get a clear picture of where foodstuffs really come from.

“Blockchain holds incredible promise in delivering the transparency that is needed to help promote food safety across the whole supply chain,” says Bridget van Kralingen, senior vice president at IBM Industry Platforms, one of JD’s partners in this initiative. Walmart is also joining in.

The China collaboration marks an expansion of the joint IBM-Walmart blockchain program that was launched over the summer in the US. Prestigious Tsinghua University is also working on the China side of things with JD.

This little piggy went to market – as verified by the blockchain. Photo credit: Nick Karvounis / Unsplash

It has already “piloted the use of blockchain to trace food items, including pork in China and mangoes in the US, as they move through the supply chain to store shelves,” said JD in a statement this morning.

Paper trail

But shoppers will not be able to tap into this system to verify the authenticity of the groceries – at least not yet.

Instead, this program is bringing together all the food supply chain documentation – often fragmented across different systems, and some are still on paper – into a blockchain system that’s transparent and traceable for both online and offline retailers and grocers.

“Brands in categories such as foods, baby and maternal, liquor, and luxury products are eager for traceability,” said Haibo Sun, head of blockchain research and development at JD, in a recent Tech in Asia interview. “Consumers are more and more focused on quality, especially in China.”

See: Alibaba, JD tackle China’s fake goods problem with blockchain

JD’s archrival Alibaba earlier this year announced its own knockoff-busting blockchain pilot, which is trying to thwart counterfeiters leaping on the growing popularity of foodstuffs from Australia and New Zealand.

Both Alibaba and – arguably to a much lesser extent – JD have faced criticism for not clamping down hard enough on sellers of counterfeits, from luxury handbags to DVDs. JD faced embarrassment in February when sham Château Lafite Rothschild wine was found for sale. “We identified a third-party merchant selling wine with a Chinese name similar to another brand and confirmed that this could easily be confusing to consumers. As a result, we immediately removed the product from the site before any had reached customers,” said the company in a statement.