Some Coca-Cola bottlers use blockchain to onboard their suppliers, according to a report from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
Indeed, Coke One North America has started a project in Ethereum to facilitate the onboarding process of Coca-Cola bottling providers with the use of blockchain.
By August 2020, 12 of the largest Coca-Cola bottlers in North America were using the blockchain platform for internal supply chain management and the nodes are expected to expand to external suppliers.
Coca-Cola bottlers
The Coca-Cola Company owns or licenses and markets numerous brands of non-alcoholic beverages, grouped into the following category groups: carbonated soft drinks; water, improved water and sports drinks; juices, dairy and vegetable drinks; tea and coffee; and energy drinks.
The company also owns and markets four of the top five brands of non-alcoholic soft drinks in the world: Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Fanta and Sprite.
Additionally, beverages bearing trademarks owned or licensed by the company account for 1.9 billion of the approximately 62 billion servings of all beverages consumed worldwide every day.
Walmart
In response to food contamination scandals around the world, Walmart has partnered with IBM to address food safety in the supply chain using blockchain technology. Using IBM Hyperledger Fabric, a blockchain-based platform, Walmart has successfully completed two blockchain pilots: pork in China and mangoes in America.
Thus, with a farm-to-table approach, Walmart’s blockchain solution has reduced the time to trace the origin of the mango from seven days to 2.2 seconds and has promoted greater transparency in Walmart’s food supply chain.
Outside of the food industry, a blockchain-enabled platform developed by Everledger, a technology company, recorded the provenance of more than 2 million diamonds throughout the supply chain.
With a unique digital identity for each diamond, the platform can track and confirm the source and location of each diamond, avoiding potential fraud and counterfeiting.
To conclude, as value chains become more complex, involve diverse stakeholders and depend on various external intermediaries, blockchain can be used to improve transparency, traceability and reliability along value chains by reduce information asymmetries, track inventories and property rights of products, allowing faster and profitable delivery of goods and improved coordination between stakeholders.
