Awarded by Walmart Food Safety Collaboration Center

OriginTrail was the first blockchain startup to receive prestigious Walmart’s Food Safety Innovation Spark Award; admitted to its inaugural Innovation Program

OriginTrail receives Walmart’s Food Safety Innovation Spark Award

We are proud to announce that OriginTrail’s blockchain-based, decentralized protocol that enables safe data sharing along supply chains was awarded by the world’s biggest retailer. Walmart already invests heavily in the application of blockchain technology for efficiency and transparency of supply chains. Its Food Safety Collaboration Center in China recognized OriginTrail’s potential for bringing transparency to supply chains, where there is huge untapped potential for increasing efficiencies on a global level.

The “Food Safety Innovation Spark Award” was presented at a ceremony in Beijing, in front of the large audience of supply chain, logistics and food safety experts. OriginTrail was the only blockchain startup among 12 selected projects that were admitted into the first generation of the Walmart Food Innovation Program.

Co-founder Ziga Drev introducing OriginTrail to an audience of Walmart executives, food safety experts and supply chain companies

OriginTrail’s blockchain-supported protocol is enabling the local producers to transparently communicate accountability and product journey in the marketplace. It is enhancing transparency, safety and greater trust in food supply chains by enabling customers to verify the provenance of every item sold on the platform. In the crowded Chinese environment that already witnessed some large-scale food safety scandals, the attention of consumers towards traceability and certified origin is increasing.

Being admitted in the first generation of the Walmart Food Safety Collaboration Center’s Innovation Pipeline gives us the opportunity to have access and feedback from the global experts in engineering the next, smarter and data-driven generation of supply chains. OriginTrail is adding a significant layer of trust to supply chains by developing the first blockchain-based protocol that can help reduce information gaps, thereby increasing efficiencies and building trust between organizations within product supply chains. We are currently implementing three other pilot use cases in China, all focused on food supply chains, that will help producers verify the provenance, authenticity, and journey of their quality products.

Tackling challenges of the global supply chains

With the global supply chain data getting increasingly fragmented, poor scalability and cost inefficiency of current decentralized solutions become evident. OriginTrail is a unique protocol enabling IT providers in the supply chain industry quick implementation of blockchain-supported data sharing in multi-organizational environments. It is a missing link that helps build transparency beyond the “one step up, one step down” principle to increase the integrity of data by performing consensus checks and safely storing fingerprints of data on immutable blockchain ledgers.

Current use cases in the food industry are pilot projects for the upcoming open source version that could be applicable to any product supply chain. This standard protocol will help improve efficiency and increase trust in supply chains on a global scale. A peer-to-peer network enables further development of decentralized apps for inventory management, supply chain optimization, compliance, certifications, and much more. It will lead to the development of a decentralized network and a plug-and-play solution, based on a mission to bring interoperability and information integrity to the fragmented supply chain world. The protocol is supporting GS1 global standards for data exchange and can include Internet-of-Things data. That’s why the project’s advisors include John G. Keogh, who is a recognized global expert in supply chain standards, transparency and trust, and Srdjan Krco, one of the leading European authorities on IoT.