Nestlé taps blockchain to track milk from farm to mouth

Food giant Nestlé Nestlé envisions real-time trackable products on the blockchain tracking baby food from source to mouth

NESTLE LOGONestlé, the largest food company in the world is tracking baby food products on the blockchain as part of a food industry exercise with nine other major food companies.

 

UPDATE: Nestlé has confirmed that Phase 3 of the Blockchain trial will testing products outside of the US which will be Mangoes from Columbia. The Phase 1 test last year on Libby’s product with single ingredient: pumpkin

 

The Blockchain implementation will be used to track the ingredients of its baby food product Gerber, with the goal of reducing food recalls and increasing consumer trust. Customers will be able to trace the origins of all ingredients and see where they have come from on a public ledger.

NESTLE baby food blockchain

 

Speaking to CIO Journal’s Kim S. Nash, “People want to know, quite rightly, where ingredients they give to their baby have come from,” he said.

 

 

“Nestlé tracks ingredients across Blockchain from suppliers to Babies mouths”

The Swiss headquartered company is working in conjunction with nine other major food companies including Walmart Inc, International Business Machines Corp and rival Unilever PLC to develop a system called Food Trust which leverages blockchain technology to create a single record shared among the firms to speed up investigations of bad food or products that are recalled.

The Nestlé blockchain experiment is making progress but is still in its early stages as the whole supply chain infrastructure requires redevelopment.This includes shipping, processing, trucking and many software stages currently used.

The supply chain industry is one of the hottest areas where Blockchain can be implemented. Just earlier this year a food scare saw twelve million boxes of baby milk being recalled in a salmonella scandal by French dairy giant Lactalis. With Blockchain technology implemented into the supply chain process food recalls, ingredients, shipping, tracking and other areas become transparent and subsequently prevent and quickly resolve such issues.

Earlier this year the UK’s Food Standards Agency trialed blockchain technology to ensure compliance in cattle slaughterhouses, one of the many governments and large companies around the world who are also looking into the benefits of the blockchain.

XYO Network: Blockchain is changing how location data is verified

Meet XYO Network the first decentralized cryptographic-location network built for the world of tomorrow

xyo network logoFor obvious reasons, many experts believe that the blockchain will be a key element in the future of the technology industry.

It allows for information to be shared and verified in a way that was never seen before its inception back in 2009. Transparency and accuracy is at the core of everything blockchain stands for, thus XYO Network is making waves among the industry as a blockchain platform which determines and verifies location data. The key components of the chain are encouraged via its token, the XYO.

XYO Network

Location data has become more and more important in recent times, as all industries become more reliant on the internet of things. The importance of this data being accurate is only going to rise too, with drones, internet shipping and automated-vehicles needing it for their day-to-day functionality.

Trusting this data is essential, but thus far there has been no perfect solution to ensuring that you can. XYO are changing that with a layered location confirmation service, which will work with different smart contract protocols and device classes.

XYO is co-founded by Arie Trouw, Markus Levin and Scott Scheper with advisory roles filled by Tom Kysar who leads operations at Augur and Raul Jordan leading the Ethereum Geth Sharding effort alongside Azam Shaghaghi and David Kim both blockchains experts.

The Network

This works with four key blockchain elements – each element is a key component to XYO and their ecosystem.

  • Sentinels – These compile location speculations and bonds Proof of Origin to the nodes above them.
  • Bridges – Gather data from the sentinels. Then attaches this data to their string, which in turn becomes available to Archivists.
  • Archivists – Stores catalogs from bridges.
  • Diviners – Collate info and verifies the location.

XY, the company behind XYO, has built one of the largest networks of Bluetooth and GPS beacons in the world.

XTO Token ICO

Those above elements are encouraged using an Ethereum-based token, entitled the XYO token.

Presale – 100 billion tokens with a hard cap of $15 million.

How does it work?

In layman’s terms the XYO network makes it possible for smart contracts to access data in the real world to determine where a specific object is.

For example a clothing company could let their customers pay on delivery to ensure the product reaches the customer safely, this would be accurately tracked by the XYO Network which would be able to track when it reaches them by utilising the largest networks of Bluetooth and GPS beacons they firm has been developing in recent years. This would all be locked into a smart contract on the blockchain preventing fraud for both parties.

This is a wide scale problem in the delivery industry with packages becoming lost in transit or stolen from customer properties.

This is just scratching the surface of what the technology aims to revolutionise, you can find out more on their website here: https://xyo.network/

 

Blockchain firm WePower aims to revolutionise green energy trading

wepower logoBlockchain-based energy trading platform WePower aims to connect energy sellers with buyers to facilitate the trading of renewable energy.

The rise of homeowners investing in rooftop solar panels has exploded in recent years with many producing a surplus amount of energy which is then fed back into the national grid. This semi-decentralised approach to energy production not only meant discounted energy bills for those homeowners but also incentivised cleaner energy production.

WePower hopes to take this idea further by making the process more transparent, competitive and highly flexible for both power generators and energy consumers on an individual level.

One way in which they aim to do this is by enabling the trading of unused energy to other buyers across the network in the form of WPR tokens. These tokens will then be tradable and represent one kilowatt per hour of energy.

This approach not only incentivises individuals to get involved with and use cleaner energy but also cuts out centralised energy providers who continually inflate the price. With WePower energy is traded by individuals making the whole process more competitive, resulting in a better deal all round.

Although still in the early stages of development, WePower have already developed a number of renewable energy plants including hydro and solar farms and built up a cache of customers who wish to this electricity. The firm also has 1 gigawatt of capacity lined up with three solar plants in Spain.

Energy experts Nick Martyniuk, Kaspar Kaarlep and Heik-ki Kolk are leading the team of 12 engineers and have previously worked on multiple smart metering implementations across Estonia.

The Blockchain development will be led by Jon Matonis, founding partner of the Bitcoin Foundation and the upcoming token launch will be spearheaded by Eyal Hertzog, co-founder of the Bancor Protocol.

With the rise of blockchain, energy production and usage can now become truely decentralised and accessible giving back control and power to the people. Those involved will have more control of their bills, energy production and the market price.

This “people powered” decentralised approach to energy production and consumption is extremely refreshing, especially given utility companies regularly carry out unfounded price hikes which ultimately leave consumers powerless and at the mercy of their providers. WePower estimates that customers can save at least 17% on energy bills through their energy grid.

Upfiring: Blockchain startup could revolutionise P2P file sharing

This year we’ve seen the launch of many ICO’s, with the majority just being blatant scams or just down right useless.

That said every so often a project comes along that not only only has a genuine purpose but also thrives in a blockchain environment. This week that project is Upfiring, a blockchain company aiming to revolutionise the P2P file sharing industry as we know it.

Utilising the Ethereum Blockchain, Upfiring has created a decentralised autonomous P2P network that allows anyone to easily share files regardless of if they are on a desktop computer or smartphone.

File-sharing is currently seen as an unrewarding process for both seeders (due to little to no return for sharing) and frustrating for downloaders (due to the lack of seeders and slow speeds).

Upfiring has a solution to address this. The company has developed technology which solves many of the current problems we see today with P2P file sharing such as seeding, searching, downloading, ratings, and peer evaluation.

In layman’s terms the Upfiring process is as follows:

  1. A seeder shares a file through the Upfiring network
  2. The file is encrypted by the platform
  3. A downloader requests access to the seeded file but can only download once they have paid using the currency of the network which is UFR tokens.
  4. Once downloaded and paid for in full the file can be decrypted.

The above is a seamless process that requires no technical; knowhow on the user’s part. Given that UFR is also a tradable currency allows both seeders and downloaders to utilise exchanges to buy and sell the tokens as and when required.

Despite file sharing existing since the early days of the internet recent statistics show that the industry has continually grown over fifty percent since 2008. With no sign of this slowing down the industry has long been overdue a technology overhaul to speed up and improve efficiency.

Some of the Issues with current file sharing platforms:

  • Lack of seeders
  • No benefit to seeders
  • Risk for seeders
  • Snooping/ privacy concerns
  • Massive disparity between file download and availability ratio.

Benefits of incentivised file sharing:

  • Seeders are compensated (resulting in more high quality seeds)
  • Larger variety of seeds
  • Seeds can be rated more effectively
  • Faster access and downloads
  • A self sufficient system that settles payment publicly

Upfiring is currently running an initial crowd offering where anyone can invest in the technology in exchange for Upfiring tokens. You can find out more about the project and support it at: https://upfiring.com/

Their whitepaper can be accessed here: https://upfiring.com/Upfiring_Whitepaper.pdf