(Bloomberg) – If you shop at Wal-Mart, you might be buying packaged produce unlike any ever sold in a U.S. store.
The sliced apples or cut broccoli — the merchant won't say what's involved exactly — are being used to test blockchain, a new database technology.
If successful, the trial could change how Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which serves some 260 million customers a week, monitors food and takes action when something goes wrong. That could spur big leaps in food safety, cut costs and save lives.
|Struggle to ID & remove recalled food
Like most merchants, the world's largest retailer struggles to identify and remove food that's been recalled. When a customer becomes ill, it can take days to identify the product, shipment and vendor. With the blockchain, Wal-Mart will be able to obtain crucial data from a single receipt, including suppliers, details on how and where food was grown and who inspected it. The database extends information from the pallet to the individual package.
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