At the 2017 China Retail Conference held by the China Chain Store & Franchise Association on November 3, Ms. Zhou Weiping, Wal-Mart’s director of China’s central government affairs and public policy, revealed that “Wal-Mart has applied blockchain technology to food testing.”

As an emerging distributed ledger technology, blockchain technology can record the entire process of assets transfering and product transaction and the records are immutable. The most prominent feature of blockchain technology is efficient, which is so useful for food traceability and this why Wal-Mart use blockchain technology as food testing.

According to pintu360.com, Wal-Mart set up the related research center in 2016 and launched the cooperation with IBM and Tsinghua University. In the first half of this year, Wal-Mart’s blockchain food testing technology has completed the confirmatory test. Ms. Zhou Weiping said:

“The entire product positioning process takes 10 seconds and the file retrieval takes only 2 seconds.”

This Wal-Mart’s project validates blockchain technology is able to date back to the source of the food, helping to improve the transparency of food testing while also verifying the reliability of the food safety data storage platform and the traceability of the entire supply chain throughout the process.

At present, the testing process is only mainly used in the detection of pork products. However, in the future, Wal-Mart will carry out the testing technology at more classification.