People in America and the World are looking at their food supply and wondering “What happened to our food?” Not only “what happened” to make the majority of our foods options so processed, but what happened to this particular piece of food, in its lifetime.
As consumers, we assume grocery stores stock healthy produce, but do we really have any proof? When you pay that extra dollar per pound for apples of the organic variety, has that “organic” apple been sat in a freezer for 9 months, just like the cheaper alternative? The jury is still out on how much better fresh produce is, but everyone would probably agree fresher is better.
Now that you are thinking about how much you actually trust your grocer, imagine a world where you can confidently do business with an entity that you do not inherently trust. What would that world look like?
You may not trust certain grocery stores on the quality of their produce. But if they provided the option to view the entire life cycle of that plant – from seed to harvest, to truck, to fridge, to shelf – and see dates and storage temperatures, you would have no choice but to trust that company (at least with that particular crop)!
Soon, we will be able to track our food from the seed to our plates.
In our modern age, we are tracking everything: packages, trucks, cars, and even people. Companies track things to provide value, give transparency, and to protect themselves. We, the people, must demand the ability to track what we eat with the same level of skill.
For your grocer to store tracking information about each crop, they would need to maintain a database with this information. The problem, however, is that the grocer would have to get the many trucking companies on board, and also the many, many, farmers on board. Therein lies the problem with centralization. Even if one grocer, like Amazon’s Whole Foods, did something like this, the truckers and farmers would get locked into that system, driving away profits away from the little people, and concentrating them into the hands of Amazon or another big corporation, all because consumers want this food data!
Benefits of a Blockchain
Enter the blockchain, a decentralized ledger in which all new data is linked to old data using secure cryptography. This allows the creation of a database where no single bad actor can manipulate data from the past. This is essential to ensuring that your grocery store cannot manipulate their data to make their product seem better.
In addition, a system like this can ensure that food products deemed unsafe by authorities can be easily be tracked and removed from the food supply. Finally, this system will incentivize people to buy sustainably and humanely grown and harvested products, as these companies will have nothing to hide.
Companies are rapidly discovering new uses of the blockchain, and at Babylon, we see how it can enable a new generation of decentralized farming, which we hope will fuel a new generation of healthy people.