Food Trust overview
Where data becomes the world’s most essential ingredient
From boardrooms to kitchens around the world, there’s unprecedented demand for a smarter, safer food supply. IBM Food Trust™ makes it possible, delivering transformative business results and unrivaled piece of mind.
Food Trust is the only network of its kind to connect participants across the food supply through a permissioned, permanent and shared record of food system data.
The result is a customizable suite of solutions that can increase food safety and freshness, unlock supply chain efficiencies, minimize waste, enhance your brand’s reputation, and contribute directly to your bottom line.
Our award-winning design makes this detailed information clear, easy-to-work-with, and actionable: IBM Food Trust won the Spark Galleries Platinum Award for Digital Design.
Food Trust benefits
7 Benefits of IBM Food Trust
Explore the benefits of a solution that connects participants across the food supply through a permissioned, permanent, and shared record of food system data. Learn about the impact on your supply chain efficiency, brand trust, food safety, sustainability, food freshness, food fraud and food waste.
People want to know, quite rightly, where ingredients they give to their baby have come from. We wanted a product in which trust meant something.
— Chris Tyas, Global Head of Supply Chain, Nestlé
Food Trust is tailored to meet your needs
Select your segment to see how.
Food Trust helps with FDA compliance
The FDA will be proposing new food traceability rules and requirements for food safety. See which businesses and foods are being affected, and learn how the IBM Food Trust Compliance Module can help simplify regulatory compliance.
The Food Trust solution
IBM Food Trust Demo
Learn how Food Trust provides supply chain visibility and efficiency, provenance for better understanding product quality, and opportunities to engage more deeply with your consumers.
Your savings with Food Trust
Your potential savings from the added efficiencies you gain by joining Food Trust. Enter your business type and size for an estimate of your total annual cost savings and total cost saved by avoiding even a single food recall.
How you can customize Food Trust
Need to rapidly trace the location and status of food products? Want to increase efficiency, minimize waste, or prove sustainability and provenance with certificates? Food Trust offers a family of scalable capabilities to fit your needs.
Case studies show the value of Food Trust
Awards
The Food Trust community is being recognized around the world for protecting the food supply and human health, reducing waste, and adding transparency to the agricultural supply chain.
Resources
Why IBM Food Trust?
Interactive demo
Industry segments
IBM Food Trust capabilities
Technology behind IBM Food Trust
Experience IBM Food Trust today
FAQ
Data usability
How does Food Trust ensure that data entered by various parties can be usable in the solution?
Food Trust has been built leveraging both business and technology standards. To ensure maximum value and access to all participants, our solution leverages standards already implemented across the food industry (i.e., GS1) and open-source technology such as Hyperledger Fabric. Interoperability on both business and technology levels enable Food Trust participants to exchange information across the food ecosystem. We work with industry leaders (e.g., GFSI) to drive industry standards for sustainability, food safety, and quality assurance.
Security
How secure is the solution?
Food Trust provides the highest level of commercially available, tamper-resistant protection for food supply chain transaction data. Use of IBM Cloud offers unique protection from insider credential abuse, protection from malware and hardware encryption key protection.
Features include:
- Always-on, high availability with seamless software and blockchain network updates
- Hardened security stack with no privileged access, which blocks malware
- 24/7/365 Blockchain Support
- Built-in blockchain monitoring for full network visibility
- Powered by The Linux Foundation's Hyperledger Fabric
Data types / APIs
What data types are leveraged and what APIs are available for Food Trust?
Please visit our Developer Zone for further information on APIs and data types.
Data ownership
Who owns the data?
You upload, you own, you control.
Your data belongs to you. Data is owned by the registered company or organization that owns the data prior to it being uploaded to Food Trust. Users can set permissions that govern what data can be seen and by whom – determined solely by the owner of the data. Data uploaded by a third party is owned by the original owner.
Inviting others
How do I invite others to join?
All food ecosystem participants can join Food Trust, via tiered modules available to buy in Marketplace. You can connect to your partners and define what information is shared when you define your transactions. Food Trust provides users and stakeholders with real-time, instant access to business-critical information from which everyone benefits.
Benefits
What value are the participants seeing from the solution?
Clients are now able to trace from store back to the farm in 2.2 seconds, where data is available. Additional business value and savings depend on company size, brand values and number and category of products implemented. Estimate the potential value you may have from the solution implementation by using the Food Trust Value Assessment Tool, which was built based on average savings that current participants are seeing.
Technology required
What technology is required to use Food Trust?
Being a Software as a Service solution (SaaS), a browser and access to internet is needed to run the Food Trust applications.
Also there are APIs available for data upload and integration with your ERP system. Learn more:
Onboarding
What are the steps required for onboarding onto Food Trust?
Onboarding to Food Trust starts with:
- assembling your team of food supply chain experts and data integration experts
- identifying your facilities and products
- defining your product scenarios
- uploading data and setting up permissions
Looking for hands-on guidance? With Virtually-Guided Onboarding sessions, Experts will lead you through the entire process.
Why blockchain?
Why blockchain?
Blockchain can help reach business goals around traceability, compliance, freshness and more by enabling a holistic ecosystem. A blockchain solution is not just about technology, it’s about solving business problems that have been insolvable before due to the inability of the ecosystem to share information in a transparent, immutable and trusted manner. Unlike other systems of record, blockchain technology provides a trusted record of data.
Blockchain defined
What is blockchain?
Blockchain provides the foundation for a new generation of transactions that establishes trust and transparency, while streamlining business processes.
Some blockchain networks, such as Bitcoin, are open to all and anonymous. Anyone can join and see any transaction that happens on those networks. These networks typically require resource-intensive computations to help prevent fraudulent transactions.
Food Trust’s blockchain solution, on the other hand, is permissioned so invited members know exactly with whom they are transacting, similar to what happens between business partners today. Participants also determine what data is seen by whom, thereby providing information on a need-to-know basis. Smart contracts also run on our blockchain, allowing business logic to help solve disputes, automatically execute contracts, and build trust.
Transform your supply chain operations
IBM Food Trust is now part of IBM Supply Chain Intelligence Suite, an AI-based supply chain optimization and automation solution that helps improve supply chain resiliency, increase agility and accelerate time to value. This integrated application suite provides actionable insights, smarter workflows and intelligent automation for faster problem resolution and more efficient supply chain operations.