Walmart and Sam’s Club announced a new tracing requirement for fresh leafy-greens suppliers on September 24, 2018, with separate deadlines for direct-supplier records and farm-level tracing. Direct suppliers must put one-step-back traceability on the blockchain network by January 31, 2019. They are then expected to work through their own operations or upstream suppliers to enable tracing back to the farm by September 30, 2019. For a supplier planning the work, meeting the first deadline would not complete the second. [S1][S2]

The supplier letter specifies the level of detail: products must be traceable to farms by production lot, in seconds rather than days. Suppliers will have to capture digital, end-to-end traceability events using IBM Food Trust. These are Walmart’s requirements, not evidence that every supplier can already perform such a search. The requested trail must reach the farm and production lot, not stop at a supplier’s name. [S2]

Walmart’s account of the existing process explains where the coordination work arises. Its team contacts a supplier, obtains paper records, then uses those records to reach the company that imported or shipped the product to its distribution center. The new approach would make that information available through a connected digital record. For suppliers, that means converting their own files is only part of the task. The farm-level deadline also depends on records held elsewhere in the chain. [S1][S2]

The letter directs suppliers to IBM onboarding options and participation modules, and says Walmart and IBM will provide recorded webinars. Walmart calls the solution low-cost, but the letter supplies neither a fee schedule nor an implementation budget. Suppliers therefore cannot read that description as a quoted total for connecting their records and coordinating with other businesses. [S2]

For customers and growers, the intended benefit is a more precise response when food is implicated in an outbreak. Walmart says faster tracing could help avoid removing unaffected products alongside suspect ones; the announcement does not establish that such losses or illnesses have already fallen. The supplier letter is explicit: blockchain tracing does not replace or reduce the obligation to follow Good Agricultural Practices. Finding a product’s origin and preventing contamination remain different jobs. [S1][S2]

Source documents

  1. In Wake of Romaine E. coli Scare, Walmart Deploys Blockchain to Track Leafy Greenshttps://corporate.walmart.com/news/2018/09/24/in-wake-of-romaine-e-coli-scare-walmart-deploys-blockchain-to-track-leafy-greens
  2. Food Traceability Initiative — Fresh Leafy Greens: supplier letterhttps://corporate.walmart.com/content/dam/corporate/documents/newsroom/2018/09/24/in-wake-of-romaine-e-coli-scare-walmart-deploys-blockchain-to-track-leafy-greens/blockchain-supplier-letter-sept-2018.pdf