The French retail giant hopes to transfer the process of tracking deliveries of 20% of its products to the blockchain by the end of 2019. Carrefour teamed up with Swiss food maker Nestle and IT developer IBM.
Carrefour is already using blockchain to track the supply chain of 20 out of 300 items, but plans to add another 40 items to the list in the upcoming months, said Emmanuel Delerm, director of the blockchain-program at Carrefour.
Carrefour already launched pilot blockchain projects in six countries, including France, Italy, Spain and China. Customers of Carrefour stores in these countries can get detailed information about the origin of the product they are buying by simply scanning the QR code on the packaging.
“When we tested this feature in China – we tested it with a Chinese pomelo – we got incredible figures,” Delerm revealed to Hard Fork. “Customers scanned one out of two (or three) pomelos to check where the fruit was coming from.”
Carrefour also entered into a partnership agreement with the Swiss company Nestle and the IT giant IBM. IBM will provide Nestle and Carrefour access to its blockchain platform, IBM Food Trust.
Customers will be able to track the supply chain of Mousline mashed potatoes from the Nestle factory to Carrefour stores by scanning the QR code on the package using their smartphones. They will see the manufacture date of the product, quality control parameters, as well as locations of warehouses and data on the farms from which the potatoes were supplied. Product information will be stored on the IBM Food Trust blockchain platform.