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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 2019 Spark Galleries Platinum Award for Digital Design.
“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
Across the ecosystem of food producers, suppliers, retailers and more, Food Trust is working with industry leaders to make blockchain innovation uniquely valuable and efficient across many segments of the food industry. Select your segment to see how.
Learn how Food Trust works and how much it can save you
About Food Trust
An in-depth discussion of what Food Trust is, how it uses blockchain, its module-based flexibility, governance, network and data security, onboarding and support, and how to build your team.
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.
Create the Food Trust you want
Need to rapidly trace the location and status of food products?
Increase efficiency, minimize waste, or prove sustainability and provenance with certificates?
Food Trust offers a family of scalable capabilities to fit your needs.
The value of Food Trust
Tracing coffee from the moment beans are picked
IBM Food Trust helps Farmer Connect increase trust with a verifiable record of coffee’s journey to your cup, tracing the beans from the moment they’re picked. The future of coffee is traceability.
Building confidence in the catch
Raw Seafoods is using Food Trust to trace their catch from harvest to end-user — helping to build trust with consumers and across the entire food supply chain.
Albertsons joins the Food Trust network
The USD 60 billion company, one of the largest food and drug retailers in the United States, is piloting the blockchain technology by tracing the bulk romaine lettuce supply chain.
How blockchain powers Food Trust
Understand the basics of blockchain technology, and its impact and value across the food ecosystem, with four quick videos.
Learn how producers, suppliers, manufacturers, and retailers are creating a smarter, safer, more sustainable food system for us all.
Awards and honors for the IBM Food Trust community
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.
FAQ
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.
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.
What is Food Trust?
IBM Food Trust™, built on blockchain, benefits all network participants with a safer, smarter, and more sustainable food ecosystem. The digitization of transactions and data provides a more efficient way of working across the supply chain, including growers, processors, shippers, retailers, regulators, and consumers.
The solution provides authorized users with immediate access to actionable food supply chain data, from farm to store and ultimately the consumer. The complete history and current location of any individual food item, as well as accompanying information such as certifications, test data and temperature data, are readily available in seconds once uploaded onto the blockchain.
The software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution is working to ensure that trust enables, rather than hinders, the expanding food system. With capabilities for safer food, longer shelf lives, reduced waste, faster traceability, and better access to shared information, Food Trust can empower you to meet the new standard for transparency and trust.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
See Food Trust capabilities and buy
Build the Food Trust solution you want by selecting the capabilities you need. Have questions or need assistance? We’re here to help.
