Carrefour Italy Tracks Chickens, Food & Fruits in their Supermarkets Using Blockchain

A promotion of Carrefour Italia carried a hotshot, claiming to trace the chickens for sale in their respective shop outlets and supermarkets on a distributed ledger technology (DLT).

The project has continued and on Thursday, January 17, the next stage will be officially presented in Bologna, the capital of Emilia-Romagna; located in northern Italy to the east of the Apennines, in the setting of the Marca fair – the potential traceability of citrus fruits.   

Foremost, it will be easy to collect and make readily available to clients on DLT the traceability information of lemons and oranges, and at the end of 2019, the service should also stretch to tomatoes, clams and other day-to-day commodities.   

The commodities tracked in this manner are given a QR code on the parcel that reports, via scanning, every data tracked for that individual commodity.   

The Technology Age   

The trial, already underway with chickens, has produced positive outcomes: a doubling of revenues on commodities traced in this manner and a great rise in visits to the page accessed through the QR code.   

The key strategic plan is dubbed Carrefour 2022 and aims to employ blockchain technology to heighten those commodities which need higher guarantees for clients.   

Particularly, it should serve to attest the source and processing, peculiarly of Made in Italy commodities, to stop the faking or wrong use of the name and of the DOP & DOCG certifications across the globe.   

This system is developed on Ethereum’s (ETH) EY Ops Chain solid-food traceability. The director of the Carrefour brand commodity line in the country, Giovanni Panzeri revealed:   

“It is one of the tools that, at Group level, we are implementing to achieve the long-term goal of becoming global leaders in the food transaction, a necessary change that we carry forward with our clients, following the values ​​of quality and reliability of the offer, sustainability, as well as accessibility of data.”   

Supply Chains   

The project is accomplished together with EY DLT Hub Mediterranean Leader, where Giuseppe Perrone is the senior advisor, and he explained that:   

“All the complex supply chains will have a benefit in the efficiency of quality control, identification of responsibilities, improvement of interactions in pricing dynamics and commodity positioning."   

In addition, Guiseppe proposes that in this manner it is very viable to achieve a 15 percent reduction in quality control times, a 20 percent reduction in total processing period, and a 5 percent advancement in profit margins on commodities.   

The EY Consumer Products Leader, Riccardo Passerini, also added:   

“The DLT is now perceived by manufacturers, distributors and the final client as a tool for full traceability. The path is traced, as evidenced by the first applications and the interest shown by the ¾ of the Italian GDO.”   

The information recorded in this manner isn’t declared or made legally valid by a trustless system, so the client must have confidence in the correctness of Carrefour while accessing it.   

The customer can, however, be sure that the information shown is exactly as kept by Carrefour but not others: the DLT, indeed, doesn’t particularly make the information kept and exposed to clients, but makes it a point that the date of their registration in DLT and their exact content.   

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