Blockchain And Food Provenance: Why It Matters

You’ve probably asked yourself where your hot dog comes from (which is a way less terrifying question than what’s in it). Food provenance, a subset of blockchain technology, is a tool that could answer that question.

It’s an important question to answer — 1 in 10 people become sick from contaminated food every year.

Keep reading to find out why it’s so important to know where your food comes from, and how provenance can help with that.

What is Blockchain?

Before we jump off the deep end with philosophical questions like where your food comes from, it’s important to understand the tools we’ll be using to answer those philosophical questions.

Enter blockchain.

Blockchain Basics

Think of blockchain like a ledger. An enormous, digital, decentralized ledger of all cryptocurrency transactions.

Wait, what?

You enter a transaction into the chain. That transaction is a block. It gets a timestamp and a link to the previous block in order to be validated. That block is then added to a chronological chain of blocks, which can be seen by anyone with the proper keys but cannot be changed, copied or deleted.

What is Food Provenance?

Where does food provenance fit in?

Think of it as a ledger. A digitized ledger, for food. One long roadmap of how your food made it to your plate, verified and validated at every step.

How It Connects to Blockchain

Food provenance is an extension of blockchain technology into the food industry. It envisions a world where you know the history of your food — the whole history.

Essentially, it takes the benefits of blockchain and applies it to the food supply chain. Great, but how does knowing where your hamburger came from do you any good?

Well, in a world where Chipotle’s 2015 E. coli outbreak and PR catastrophe is not only possible but easy to understand on account of unclear supply chains, knowing where your food comes from isn’t just reassuring, it’s good for your health.

How Can Blockchain Help?

Before we dive into how blockchain can help, let’s talk about why transparency in the food supply chain is so important (and why it’s currently lacking).

The Fake Food Scam

Food suppliers have come a long way from the early days of factory-made food. Don’t give them too much credit yet. They’re still not 100% honest about your food.

Take 2016. Kind of a rough year. Especially for foodies. Like the part where there were reports left and right of food fraud in cheese, olive oil, and beef, to name a few.

Don’t believe it? Fun fact: extra virgin is the highest quality rating olive oil can receive. 80–85% of olive oil named extra virgin in the U.S. isn’t actually extra virgin.

Then, there’s 2017. Possibly an even rougher year. The year 36 million pounds of imported soybeans were fraudulently labeled organic.

Think you know the full story about your food? Think again.

It isn’t just that companies are trying to con you. It’s that their supply chains are so complex and their information is so incomplete that they’re clamoring for a way to verify the authenticity of what they sell — both for your trust and their reputation.

Bringing Trust Back to Food

Blockchain is a trustless system. And no, we don’t mean trustless in a ‘no honor among thieves’ type of context.

When we say blockchain is trustless, we mean that it’s a system that requires no trust. It’s a system that eliminates the need for trust by design — no one needs to trust anyone else in order for the system to work.

It’s a huge, 100% digital ledger of every cryptocurrency transaction ever, and it doesn’t require trust. Mind-blowing, isn’t it?

Here’s how.

We already said that every time you enter a transaction, it’s put into the chain chronologically, with a timestamp and a link to the previous block, both of which validate it.

We’ve also said that blockchain is decentralized. That means there is no one server out there in the world with all the blockchain information. Everyone can inspect it, but no one can retroactively change, copy or delete it. No single user controls a blockchain, either.

The cryptography involved in blockchain technology is also formidable.

Mathematical scrambling is used to boil an original piece of information in a transaction into a code called a hash. The only way to tamper with an entry is to tamper with the hash — except that the hash is linked sequentially to every entry that came before it.

In other words, the only way to hack one blockchain entry is to hack every entry in the entire chain, all the way back to the very first entry of the whole chain.

Oh, and the system is validating and revalidating the whole chain while you’re trying to do that.

Blockchain in Food Provenance

So where does that leave us with food provenance?

For one thing, it makes it incredibly difficult to falsify information relating to a product, given that the information is checked and approved by consensus.

It also means that if there was a mistake somewhere in the supply chain, you can be sure that the provenance of the materials hasn’t been changed retroactively. Mistakes, in other words, are all but impossible to hide.

This means that issues can be spotted and resolved long before the product reaches a retailer. It also means that you, the buyer, would have a means to trace where your food came from if somehow a problem slipped through the cracks.

Remember those “organic” soybeans? Think of how hard it would be to slap on an organic label if their whole provenance up to that point says they’re non-organic, and the labeler can see that information before approving the product.

Smarter Use of Blockchain Technology

You want to know where your food comes from. Blockchain can revolutionize how you get your answers.

We know it, you know it, and we want to help you use it.

Looking for somewhere to start? Check out our guide to raw materials and food trading, or our post on commodity exchange with Chain Trade.