Supply chains

This is current guidance for food businesses in England, Northern Ireland and Wales. A reader in Scotland is pointed to Food Standards Scotland.

Traceability means being able to follow a food product and its ingredients through the supply chain, from production, processing and distribution to the final sale. A food business must keep systems that identify the business it received food from, and the business it supplied. That is one step back and one step forward. A business that sells to the final consumer generally does not have to keep those forward records for sales to consumers. The records must be accurate, and ready if an authorised officer asks for them.

The law does not set one method for keeping these records. A business chooses its own system. The systems listed are paper records, electronic records, stock management systems and traceability software. A distributed ledger is not named. The page is about food. Feed, animals that produce food, and substances intended for use in food or feed have their own rules.

Two pilots had finished, and a third was still going, in the words of the file. The file is the Food Standards Agency's paper on its work with blockchains. The copy read is the one the National Archives captured on 10 Oct 2020. The file has no publication date of its own. During 2018 and early 2019 the agency took part in three trials and paid for two of them. Those two had finished. The third was still going.

The first pilot recorded inspection results for cattle. A blockchain tracked, reported and audited the animal's condition, against an ear tag number. No haulier or shop information was captured. The technology was Hyperledger Fabric. The participants were the agency, Dovecote Park, Dunbia and ABP. The project also spoke with AHDB and DEFRA. The paper does not spell out ABP, AHDB or DEFRA.

The second pilot is export health certificates for pork. The aim was to use a blockchain in that process. The technology was R3 Corda. The participants were the agency, Cranswick, official vets, and APHA. The paper does not spell out APHA. APHA produces the certificate.

The third pilot is on wine imports. HM Revenue and Customs led it, with the agency supporting, under the name Reducing Friction in International Trade. The technology was a combination of Ethereum, Sawtooth and Corda. The participants were Portavin, Wine Australia, the Wine and Spirit Trade Association, HM Revenue and Customs, the agency, Casella Family Brands and Alliance Wines. The work was still going. The intention was that it would feed into a Utility Trade Platform for the UK, then a prototype led by HM Revenue and Customs.

A review found that the technology itself is not hard to put in place. The hurdles are policy, trust, legal frameworks, process, how data is defined, and whether the participants' systems can work together. The summary spells the reviewer's surname Hileman, and a later section spells it Hilleman. The paper then describes the Open Ecosystem Federation, a toolkit that does not depend on one technology, for sharing a minimum of data as a product crosses the border. A blockchain solution can sit beside one that is not a blockchain. Taking part should not force an organisation to rebuild its systems, and records kept off a blockchain can be arranged so that they communicate with one.

The two pilots the agency led cost roughly £300,000 across two financial years.

This is a review of trials, not a service. The report is dated Sep 2020. It is research paper 2020/036, written by London Economics for the Office for Product Safety and Standards. It was published on 2 Oct 2020. The views are the authors' own. They are not necessarily those of that office, or of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and they do not necessarily reflect government policy.

When the report was written, these were a new and small market. Most industrial uses in supply chains were a proof of concept, a prototype, or a pilot, with a few exceptions already running. This card does not name those exceptions.

In some established supply chains, many of the benefits of a distributed ledger can be had by improving the records already kept of where a product came from. Pharmaceuticals, and some parts of the food sector, are named as places where a reluctance to change the paperwork is likely to slow take-up. Those systems are described as already well proven and tuned. In many cases, the report says, the main gains in efficiency can be had with other technology, rather than a blockchain.

A distributed ledger is only as good as the data put into it. Blockchain technology on its own does not catch a wrong input.

The platform was stopped, on the operators' announcement. On 29 Nov 2022 A.P. Moller - Maersk and IBM said they would withdraw the TradeLens offerings and discontinue the platform. Full global industry collaboration had not been achieved. TradeLens had not reached the commercial viability needed to continue and to meet the financial expectations of an independent business. The intent was that the platform would go offline by the end of the first quarter of 2023.

The platform was announced in 2018 and built jointly by IBM and GTD Solution, a division of Maersk. It is described as blockchain-enabled. Maersk would continue to digitise the supply chain through other solutions. An advisory dated 1 Dec 2022 says TradeLens would no longer be offered, for a lack of adequate viability in the market. That advisory names three products Maersk would continue to offer: DigitalLCL, MyCustoms and Maersk Flow. It does not say how those products keep a record.