Camelot ITLab, DellEMC and Intel have just published a case study for how blockchain technology can be leveraged for Ingredients Regulation Automation in the consumer goods industry. This blogpost gives first insights into the use case scenario. The full report with further details, especially on the technical side, can be downloaded here.
Did you ever wonder why certain ingredients on your food packaging are highlighted while others are not? There are regulatory requirements to ensure consumers get the information needed to cope with allergies and other food intolerances. Further industries like animal food or cosmetics have similar regulations.
Challenge: Complex Supply Chains
These regulations get updated on a regular basis and companies producing consumer goods need to adapt quickly. The challenge is to trace all ingredients back through the whole supply chain, which can take months, especially when many suppliers and sub suppliers are involved. Imagine a producer of fresh products like cheese: as long as the new regulation can´t be applied, they can´t sell their already produced and labeled products. In worst case, a whole batch has to be disposed.
The situation is even more complicated: the information about contained substances is located deeply inside the intellectual property of the suppliers, namely in their secret product recipes. No company wants to disclose more information than absolutely necessary to partners, authorities or even competitors. So, what´s the solution?
Blockchain
With a blockchain-based solution this process can be heavily automated while securely protecting the intellectual properties of the suppliers. A process duration of two months could be shortened to a few hours by applying the proposed architectures. Blockchain based off-chain smart contracts for regulated compounds act as trusted platform between producers, suppliers and regulatory control instances, without disclosing any secret recipe information. The newly developed use case is based on SAP HANA® software, SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain Services and Camelot Trusted Computing Appliances running on Dell EMC™ PowerEdge™ servers.
To learn more, please download the case study here.