Carrefour Bio is breaking new ground and has announced it is to use blockchain technology with its products starting in April 2022. Behind the initiative is consumers’ growing desire for transparency when it comes to the provenance of its organic products and the production methods used to make them. Carrefour thus becomes the first retailer to use blockchain technology with its own-brand organic products.
This technology for storing data securely and in a tamperproof manner will be used with the retailer’s Carrefour Bio products. This way, consumers will have transparent access to all available information about the route that the products in question have taken – from when they were produced through to their shipment to stores.
In April 2022, the Carrefour Bio Spanish-origin dessert orange, sold in trays of four, will be the first product to leverage the benefits of blockchain technology, before it is gradually extended to all Carrefour Bio brand products.
Benoît Soury, the Carrefour Group’s Organic “Carrefour is a trailblazer when it comes to organic produce in France, and through its Act for Food programme, it has undertaken to implement a comprehensive traceability scheme to ensure extremely high levels of transparency. By using this technology with our organic products for the first time, we are delivering on our aim of becoming the leader in the food transition for everyone.”, said Benoît Soury, the Carrefour Group’s Organic Market Director.
A QR code for retracing the itinerary of each batch
Essentially, consumers can access information about a given product simply by scanning the QR code on its label. This will tell them all about the product’s life cycle. That is its origin and the pathway it has taken, producer name, field location, packaging location, transport means.
Also, its quality, harvest date, analysis results, variety and seasonality.
Additionally, its organic certification, conversion date, official certificate, additional initiatives implemented by the producer.
Having made a number of commitments to deliver the food transition for everyone, Carrefour is the first European retailer to have started using blockchain technology for food traceability back in 2018 for its Carrefour Quality Line products, working alongside IBM. Last year, it extended the technology to include TEX brand clothing and is now using it with Carrefour Bio brand products to provide consumers with even more transparency.