Frank Yiannis, Deputy Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) shared this story at the International Association of Food Protection (IAFP) meeting in Louisville, Kentucky this week.

He bought a sack of mangoes from a local grocery store on his way into work. He called his team together, sat the sack on the table and made a simple request. He asked his staff to identify the country of origin and trace the path of the mangoes from the farm to his local store. The request seemed easy enough as all food that enters the United States comes with import paperwork and all food grown here is traceable.

Six days and 18 hours later, the mango pedigree was delivered to his desk and the FDA decided that there needed to be a better way.

Enter blockchain supply tracking and trace technology. The idea seems so simple. Every individual lot of food meant for human consumption is given a unique identifier and as it moves through the supply chain process it is scanned and verified each step of the way. Once the product reaches its destination, all the points it has traveled are stored in the cloud for easy accessibility. It’s a big data nightmare, but overall a great idea. The magnitude of benefits would include full audit trail traceability, single timestamped and tamper-proof source of data, real-time rule-based verification of multi-party confirmations and trusted digital signature-based peer to peer interactions.

Imagine a world where transparency reigns supreme. Imagine a world where regulatory agencies, processors and consumers all have access to the same data. That data would help to ensure and verify the overall quality of the producer who grew the food, the plant where it was made and the regulatory agency that oversaw the process.

Mr. Yiannis announced that this revolutionary process will be the next horizon for the FDA. By using blockchain tracking and trace, the same search that previously took almost seven days could be completed in a mere 2.3 seconds.

By Brett Roeller
Director of National Accounts, QualiTru Sampling Systems
brett@qualitru.com   Follow Brett on LinkedIn