With an eye to improve business transparency, Swiss food and drink conglomerate Nestlé S.A. has recently revealed plans to introduce IBM Food Trust blockchain in its Zoégas coffee brand, and has partnered with Rainforest Alliance to support tracking of coffee beans’ data.

According to a statement, Nestlé said that it will be adding QR codes to the packaging used with Zoégas’ “Summer 2020” coffee product that are sold in Sweden. With this, customers can scan these codes and track their beans’ journey from farm to shelf. In the meantime, the traceability data will be stored on IBM’s food tracing blockchain.

Apparently, IBM Food Trust will attain some part of that data from Rainforest Alliance and Nestlé, coming as a change for the food giant which had a limited third party supply chain data in its prior QR code traceable product initiative.

Commenting on move, a Nestlé spokesperson said that their company, up till now, has been testing the most efficient way to introduce IBM Food Trust internally in tandem with its current systems. Prior to linking their data to other organizations for end to end view, Nestlé first had to build a robust knowledge and knowhow.

The move involved three years of IBM Food Trust trials, with two open-data product launches on the books, following which Nestlé believed that Food Trust was ready for more data sources.

As per Nestlé, the collaboration does not adhere major technical challenge as IBM Food Trust has seemingly become fairly mature while Rainforest Alliance was keen to invest more efforts and time to make it work.

Reports claim that Blockchain traceable coffee is becoming a new marketing trend across the global coffee industry. Observing this growing trend, Starbucks has started to collaborate with Microsoft’s Azure blockchain platform to offer consumers “farm to cup” information, while software firm GrainChain and IBM in January rolled out a coffee tracing app.

Source Credit: https://www.coindesk.com/nestle-partners-with-rainforest-alliance-to-trace-coffee-beans