Non-profit blockchain organization Iota Foundation has teamed up with digital food safety management firm Primority to track food allergens via blockchain, Iota tweeted on June 20.
The new partnership aims to reduce risks associated with potentially fatal food allergens, targeting 220 million people with food allergy worldwide, as Iota noted in the tweet.
The collaboration includes the development of a prototype of an application that would enable consumers to check food products for allergens, particularly those that go under usual radars for a number of reasons, including cases when products share production lines with allergen-containing products, according to a blog post by Iota.
Specifically, the application will be based on Iota’s immutable distributed ledger protocol Tangle, and integrated with Primority’s 3iVerify platform, which will enable the information collected from manufacturers to be automatically shared on Iota’s Tangle.
As such, the application will reportedly allow consumers to access a number of details about food products by scanning a barcode on the app. The shared information would include tracking of raw materials used and their suppliers, as well as a review of food production processes. As Iota stressed in the announcement, consumers will be able to access the data “without sharing any personal, sensitive information, and without owning any cryptocurrency.”
Recently, Cointelegraph reported on collaboration between American seafood trade association National Fisheries Institute (NFI) and IBM’s blockchain-based supply chain solution Food Trust to trace seafood species.
In April, research firm Gartner predicted that as much as 20% of the top 10 global grocery suppliers will run using blockchain technology by 2025.